Ain’t there yet, but I’m healing.

Losing you was both the easiest and hardest thing I’ve ever lived.

It was easy in the way that you pulled the trigger. So quickly, so definitely.

It knocked the wind out of me, and was impossible to process then- even now.

I wasn’t consulted, I wasn’t allowed to weigh in on the decision. You hurt me beyond repair and then walked away.

I have felt heartbreak before. I have felt loss before… but this was different. I was grieving the loss of a person still very much here. A person who was still such a huge part of my life, but was no longer mine.

There are over a decade of memories left hanging in the walls of my heart. Endless laughs and so many tears light up the lost years. I clung to them at first. I clung to the past we had and the future we could have had.

I clung to the idea you would walk through that door and make it all right. That’s the funny thing about heartbreak. It tricks your mind into thinking everything was great. It makes you want to fight so hard to make the pain stop. At first, I was fighting to bring who I had lost back to me. Seems to be human nature to do so. But as so much of what had happened unravelled, it was getting harder and harder to justify doing so.

I tried to reconcile the infidelity, with the person I knew you were. A kind and good man. A gentle and sweet soul. How could they be the same? How could one have become so intertwined in the other? I drove myself crazy finding all the ways I was at fault for it. Replaying in my mind all the ways I could have been different, and changed the course for us. The truth of it is that only you could have changed the way this ended.

It was the hardest in the way that it destroyed me, losing you. The way it ached in my chest endlessly. I couldn’t bring myself to eat, I spent nights crying until I fell asleep. The way it felt so necessary yet hopeless moving forward, alone. It was the way you got to move out and start fresh, because I stayed in our home and tried to make it my own. Tried and tried, but without success. You were around every corner. You were cooking in the kitchen, laughing at the tv in the living room, sitting on the back porch, filling the other side of my bed. - our bed. Your clothes no longer hang in my closet and your arms no longer squeeze me in the mornings. It’s hardest in all those ways too.

But, if I’m being honest with myself, the hardest part has been the way you seemingly have not struggled with this at all. The way you didn’t fight to keep me, and instead eagerly let me go. The way you threw yourself into your new life and haven’t yet looked back, while I’m still pulling emotional shrapnel out from my heart.

The cold shoulder and bruised ego you displayed continued to twist the dagger. Allowing the pain to spill over into any and all the good we had left here. Your path of continual destruction has tainted every beautiful moment in my memory of you. I had to put a stop to it myself, and put some space between us. I want to seal those precious moments, before the hurt and anger destroy them forever.

I’ve began to pick myself up, and move myself forward now. I’ve began to smile, and laugh again. I see potential and feel optimism in a way I didn’t think I could again. I have begun looking ahead and not dreading the mornings without you. It has been such a gift to myself, the allowance of healing. One I will continue to keep gifting myself as long as need be.

I will always wish the same for the man I loved most of my life.