This is How You Got Over Them

It was finished in a burst of emotion. It was done. It was over, and you were left to begin again. You were left to pick up the pieces of your broken heart, to somehow try and put it back together. You were a mess. You were a broken, awful mess. You couldn’t even walk down the block to the Walgreens without feeling like you were going to break down in the middle of the street.

You screamed. And then you felt okay, but actually, you weren’t – because it was still all so new. You were new to the fact that this person had removed themselves from your life and you were expected to just be okay with it. You were far from okay with it. You were hurting everywhere and you hated it.

You cried on the floor of you apartment when you had too much wine and everything came flooding in, as if the dam of all of your emotion had been broken.

You fell apart when you realized that that they had already moved on to someone else.

You almost collapsed to the ground when you got a whiff of hot garbage that reminded you of the shortcut you would take through the alley to get to their apartment.

You smirked when you realized how ironic it was that the smell of hot garbage reminded you of them.

You laughed when you realized how silly you felt about it all.

You laughed because with time it began to get a little better. It always feels better until you are caught by feelings of surprise and grief. The end of a relationship is like the end of a life. Your relationship died, and you need to mourn.

You are allowed to cry, but this kind of death can be harder to accept because that person is still there. They are still attainable. They are still able to be in your life. You are constantly “what if-ing”, but you know in the deepest parts of your heart that you need to get over them.

So you wrote about them. You overthought every word, every single word that they had said to you, sent to you, or somehow felt that was subtweeted about you. You talked about them nonstop to the people you care most about, to the point where you drove your family and friends nuts. You thought about them. You dreamt of them. You had nightmares about them. You wished for them to come back. You wished that you had never met them.

You sincerely wished that you had never met them.

And it’s not because they didn’t bring joy into your life and it’s not because things didn’t work out. It is because the heartache that they have left with you could kill a thousand people. The impact that they had left on you had been so great and so strong that you don’t think it could really be erased. You really felt like that there was something there that could have been forever life changing. The only thing was, it was forever life changing…just not in the way that you would have ever wanted. This kind of pain you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.

But you went through the motions. You went through all of heartache and crying. You went through all the overthinking and all of the questioning. You went through all of it. And you survived. You got over them. You went through all of those nights of wishing and waiting to the point where you no longer thought about them anymore. They didn’t cross your mind when you listened to that one song. You didn’t get the urge to text them after too many drinks. You didn’t see yourself living a future with them anymore, and that is how you knew you were over them.