The Past

You will have trouble falling asleep late at night, even when your eyelids are heavy and hanging, because you will keep replaying the past on a loop inside of your mind. You will think about the way he used to kiss you. The way he used to fit your hand inside of his. The way he used to laugh. The way he used to hug.

Then you’ll start replaying the toxic moments inside of your mind, trying to figure out where everything went downhill, why your once happy relationship had to come to an end.

You will torture yourself by wondering whether he was actually miserable when you thought everything was going well, whether he was faking smiles, whether there were giant waving red flags that you somehow missed.

You will sort through your memories as a way to find closure, but they will only make you more miserable. They will only make you miss what you used to have even more.

The Present

You will hear a joke and reach for your phone to text your person, only to realize at the last second that he’s not your person anymore and it would be a bad idea to text him.

You will be excited to watch a certain movie, but the entire time you will be thinking about what comments he would have been making if he was sitting beside you in the theater with his hand around your shoulders.

You will realize that you lost more than a boyfriend, you lost your best friend, the person who knew the most about you, the person who you spent most of your time talking to when you were bored.

You will spend too much time crying, too much time thinking about him, too much time wondering whether he is suffering as much as you are or whether he is already over you and interested in somebody else now. You will have trouble accepting that he does not matter anymore, he is not going to be around anymore.

The Future

You will not only mourn the past and regret the present, you will also deal with the realization that the future you had imagined inside of your head is never going to become a reality.

You are never going to take that vacation he kept promising to bring you on. You are never going to see that concert you planned to buy tickets for together. You are never going to have children together. You are never going to get married. You are never going to live happily ever after.

You have to rearrange the plans you had set so long ago. You have to create a new set of dreams for yourself. You have to change everything around because a future without him changes everything.

It changes where you thought you’d be living. Where you thought you’d be working. How you thought you’d be spending your Sunday nights. It changes your entire idea of what your future will hold.