To My Ex On The Day He Got Engaged

So today, you got engaged.

Once upon a time, I was sure that when you dropped down to one knee, picked out the perfect ring, and worked up the courage to ask that question, it would be me with tears in my eyes saying yes. But instead, today I was ringing out customers at one of my part time jobs, which I am working to help pay my way through graduate school, while you are making a decision to spend the rest of your life with someone else. I’ll admit it. It came as quite a shock. I can remember so clearly being the girl that I thought would bare your last name. I doodled it on my notebooks in undergrad and remember thinking it had such a ring to it.

I drove my car home from work today, the one I bought myself, the one you’ll never sit in the passenger seat of, the way you did when you would teach me how to drive. I didn’t know that at the same moment you might be kissing the girl who is going to be your wife. It’s been two and a half years since the day you left me, for her actually, not that that matters anymore. At the time, I cried, swearing to myself that it was a rebound, thinking that in time you would find your way back to me.

I didn’t know then what I know now.

At 21, I didn’t know I would live so many lives after you. I didn’t know that there would be other boys. Boys who played with my head, but couldn’t steal my heart. I never loved them, not like I loved you, but each one has taught me even more about myself and who I will someday love, more importantly, what type of man I will allow to love me. When you left you were my world. I thought that you completed me.

Now I know that I have to build my own world. Now I don’t want someone who completes me, I want someone who compliments me. I used to think that I liked living my life by your side. Now I know that always having someone by my side makes me feel like I can’t breathe.

Today you took the next step in your life. Today, I’ll continue taking steps in mine, towards a future I am ecstatic about. I hope you are happy. I hope you’re happy because I’m happy now. I am not the sad girl you used to know, who cried herself to sleep without you, whose depression was too much to take for someone so young like you were.

I wish you good health. I am blessed to have finally found the healthy and balanced existence I was lacking for so long. I found out how to feel beautiful, strong, happy, enough, and I thank you for that. If you would have stayed, I might have always believed that you were the best thing about me and never searched for more and found that it was always within myself all along.

I hope life gives you everything you were looking for, everything I couldn’t give to you. I will always cherish our memories. I think that you brought out some amazing qualities in me. You made me laugh. You showed me what a first love is supposed to feel like. You taught me what I want in a man and what I do not what in my own future. I hope that the girl you marry appreciates your silly voices, your mannerisms, the way you bite your tongue when you’re thinking too hard. The freckle on your lip and roughness of your hands.

I hope she does because I did and I always will for what it’s worth.

I hope more than anything that you keep all the promises you made to her, the promises that you couldn’t keep for me, because love is keeping your promises. I wish you the best, and I finally mean it. So to the little piece of my heart you will always carry with you, goodbye.

And good luck.