To The Woman Who Broke My Heart – Thank You

The truth is that I accepted my fate long before everyone else around thinks I did. You never wanted me, and deep down I knew that — even if I refused to accept or acknowledge it. But even knowing in my bones, my heart, and my soul that the answer was a no, I still wanted to hear it from you. I’ve come to realize that I needed to hear it from you if I was ever going to truly let you go and move on.

I pined after you for months, exhausting emotional endurance and the patience of my closest friends. You said that you weren’t ready for something new, that the timing wasn’t right, and maybe that was all true; but none of it detracts from the reality that you never wanted me to have any role in your life: as a friend, an acquaintance, someone to talk to when you were bored. I was a cameo appearance, and nothing more; and that’s okay.

The long-overdue rejection could’ve been an excuse to succumb to reality and admit that whatever I felt for you — love, infatuation, butterflies — was a disillusion of emotions I had no business putting any faith or stock into, but I can’t do it.

I cared for you, deeper than anyone before and in a way that was incomparable to anything else. That doesn’t change because you don’t feel the same way, and I refuse to taint the legitimacy of my feelings by saying otherwise.

My heart broke when you told me, there’s no other way to describe it. I carried on the next week emotionally numb, dejected, and hurt. There was no joy to be found around me, and my persona had rented a smile to mask the pain. That’s the reality of the immediate aftermath.

The reality is also that none of that is your fault. I could easily revert to childish behavior and blame you, sully your name in public, or look at you any different the second after you told me from the second after I saw you, but none of it would be right or fair to you.

If I truly feel the way I know I do about you, I’ll probably never stop caring for you. I don’t have the same adulation towards you I once did, but it would be presumptuous to think that my feelings would reroute once you closed the book on us.

I will no longer waste my time with foolish wishful thinking that a happy ending awaits us.

The only happy ending I wish for now is yours, whatever that entails. It was hard to believe you never wanted me, and even harder to accept it, but just because I can’t be the one to make you happy doesn’t mean someone else shouldn’t be afforded that luxury.

I never intend to be a burden in your life or in your phone, so if you ever stumble across this, I want to thank you for delivering a rejection bereft of grey area. Cutting the cord with someone — especially when it involves the strings of their heart — is no easier for one party or the other, and I want you to know I understand what you must’ve been going through before, during, and after delivering the news.

I’m a better person since the heartbreak, in that I feel a restored confidence, purpose, and self-worth that was absent while yearning for you. You said you are sure I’ll find the right girl out there, and I’m now in a place where I feel that I can be the right man for her if and when she comes into my life.

I’ve come to look at heartbreak like cauterizing a wound: The messenger has to apply seemingly unbearable pain to someone already hurting in order for the bleeding to stop and the pain to heal.

Once the healing is complete, a scar will remain on the patient — an everlasting reminder that as painful as those events were, they were able to move on past it.

Thank you for ending my pain.