I Don’t Miss You, Because I Can’t Mourn Someone Who Didn’t Think I Was Magic

There are people who gut you when they leave. Everything feels empty and upside down and you are left hollow. You become a version of yourself whose only capability is mourning. You get stuck holding the bag of the relationship — feeling pathetic for how much you miss them, and for how long.

And then there are the people whose departure is a gift. They leave and we prepare for this mourning to set in, but it never comes. In the place between your shoulders where a weight should appear, relief comes instead. You feel lighter.

And then you realize in their absence what you couldn’t realize in their presence: you did’t actually want to end up with them.

While you were together you could explain away every fault they had. Because you are generous and capable of love, you see the best in people. You knew they would get better, you knew they would change. Maybe they still will, but you don’t have to wait around for it.

Now that they’ve left you are free to remember their mediocrity in its full magnitude. They were never the exciting love you’ve dreamed of. They weren’t a good person, they way you wanted them to be. They lacked the imagination to see what you could be, together — how good you could make each other. Maybe he didn’t see it because he wasn’t interested in it to begin with, he wasn’t brave enough to want to be more than ordinary.

Every time you think you should be missing him, you’ll just remember what he wasn’t. He wasn’t your big love, he was too small to fill this role in your life. Don’t confuse the part of your heart that is so full of love for someone for a part that mourns him.