It takes a lot to get over someone you loved.  For me, what hurt the most were not the memories we shared, but the future I thought we would have together.  How does your heart stop loving just because your head tells you to?  I’ve had a few break ups and each one was devastating in their own right.  With the last one, I came to realize that I was tying my future with my boyfriends and staying with them because I thought we were somehow fated.  I know now fate is not how the cards are dealt, but how they lie.  Sometimes, we read too much of the future into our relationships and we see something that isn’t there, so we tell our friends ‘you don’t see what I see when it’s just us alone.’  And yet, that is exactly why we are blind, because we are stuck in this idea that we are fated to be with them if only we could pull through.

Day by day, it got easier after the break-up.  Eventually, I stopped loving him, something so alien to me when I thought my heart couldn’t take any more.  I learned to forgive each of them as human beings and old friends.  I could not hold it against them, for no one sets out to really hurt us.  They only hurt us through their clumsy attempts at love while still figuring out who they are.  However, I knew I could never forgive them as partners.  If you are contemplating the thought of getting back with them, ask yourself if you can truly forgive them.  If so, you must never bring up what caused the hurt again.  If you cannot, then you shouldn’t put yourself and them through that pain again. That’s the thing about forgiveness.  You can afford it to friends, but not partners because it would always loom in the relationship until it came out in an argument.  I can be friends with my exes, but I can never be in a relationship with them again.

And yet, I still found myself dreaming of them from time to time of the things left unsaid between us and the feelings that slowly waned but never died. They awakened like a phoenix with me in the morning sun and I felt that old, familiar fire once again. Yet I know that is all they are; merely dreams of a long-gone past with unresolved feelings. I tell him he has nothing to worry about for the sleeping me doesn’t remember the acts they committed to cause me such heartbreak. Perhaps heartbreak never really heals, but exists as a reminder of how fragile we are and how we would like to be treated and how we should treat others. Especially the ones we love.   Now I know I should enjoy relationships for what they are instead of what they can be.  I can live with the idea that there will always be a part of me missing because I left it with them, but they gave me part of them as well.