I Loved You For Your Brokenness

I loved you for your brokenness. For your humanity. The parts of you that you only let me see and get to know so intimately. It was an all-encompassing kind of love, the kind that you only really get once in a blue moon. It was a love like I’d personally never experienced before, so open and free in nature. I loved the parts of you that you didn’t disclose to many people. I loved the parts of you that you were so sure no one else would. And you loved me too, unabashedly broken in my own neuroses.

It was the kind of love you hear about in myths and legends. The kind of love you don’t go looking for but instead finds you. The kind of love that changes absolutely everything about you and the way you see the world. The kind of love that leaves you feeling forever changed when it’s gone because you realize you’re now going to be looking for something totally different than you had ever sought out before. All your prior relationships were based upon superficialities of attraction — qualities you had consciously deemed appropriate, appealing, and respectable in a partner, and in yourself. But this love was never about that. Sure there was certainly attraction — a lot of it. But there were so many other things. There was authenticity. There was ease. Everything was laid out on the table for both parties to see. I could tell you anything and there was never any judgement. There was never a feeling that I needed to keep things hot and fresh so that I wouldn’t lose the connection. There were none of the worries and anxieties that had plagued my past relationships in which I tried to maintain an image of perfection with which the person fell in love with. No, because I fell in love with your darkest parts, and you with mine. And due to that, I don’t think I could have lost you if I tried, and I tried many times, for unrelated reasons that only you will know.

But in the end it was me who cut the cord once and for all, because things seemed to be getting serious with your new girlfriend and she fit the mold of your life better than I did. But don’t think for a moment it was because I stopped loving you and all of your beautiful, psychotic, terrible, exquisite, dark, dirty, lovely, delicious flaws.

Those parts of you, they continue to appear in my dreams. And they haunt me in my waking reality. And the truth is, I miss them. But I won’t go back to them, because of the way you mistreated me and you used me. I suppose that was the trade-off in the predicament I was in, for loving someone’s flaws. For loving someone in their entirety, darkness and all. Maybe it was naive of me to love these things about you when you didn’t appreciate them about yourself, but the connection was almost subconscious, soulful, powerful, all-encompassing. And I never wanted you to change those things about yourself, intriguing as they were, but you were ashamed of them. I loved the person you were really were, but didn’t show to the world, because the person you really were was the person you didn’t want others to see. And the false image you wanted for yourself was one that does not include me.