I Had To Forgive Myself For Loving You

It was never you that hurt me; I hurt myself. I brought it upon myself when I turned a blind eye to the half promises and let downs. I had painstaking mapped out my own destruction every time I ignored all the warning signs that were flashing in neon lights. I’m not saying what you did was right, I’m not saying you didn’t play a part, but in the end I should have known this would happen.

And when it did, I should have let go.

We started out like every new love does. We shared pieces of ourselves that we had previously kept secret from the rest of the world. But what I wasn’t paying attention to was how much more I was willing to share. How much more I was willing to give. You gave just enough to peak my interest, just enough to keep me wanting more.

Since I had so little of you, it hurt knowing I had relinquished so much more of myself. The pain I was feeling wasn’t the thought of losing you, because I never truly had you. The real heartache was the realization I had lost myself.

And when we talked about the future, you worded everything so carefully. You spoke in hopes and dreams, when I was making invariable plans. You always talked about us moving across the country, starting our life over in this city or that.

You knew that would never happen, they weren’t in the cards we were playing.

But I fell for the bluff, I fell for the web of fantasies you were spinning. It’s so obvious now you weren’t planning for the same future I was, but my judgement was clouded with my desire for you.

It wasn’t you I had trouble letting go of, it was the idea of you I had created.

These were the thoughts that haunted me in the days after you were gone. There was nothing that I was truly missing about you, it was the disappointment in myself. Again I had opened my heart to someone who had no intentions of opening theirs. I let myself believe that this time would be different when even you were warning me at every turn to walk away.

But walking away was hard. My feet were stuck in the cement foundation I had built around you. It was trying to break through that, building myself back up that would take so much out of me.

It was like walking through a fire that I had set ablaze, trying to piece together the parts of my heart that I had shattered with my own vulnerability.

I never had to teach myself to forgive you, but it took months to forgive myself.

I had to learn to love the parts of me that had done this. I had to learn to let go of the pain they caused. I had to accept that even though this pain was self-inflicted, that I would be okay. I had to accept that this would be a lesson learned and I would rise again.