Why It Hurts To Be In Love With Someone Else

You’re the one I’ll never get over.

The one that will make me close my eyes for five more minutes in the morning, even if my mind is awake, because my dream had you in it. The one that I procrastinate attaching detachment to, despite your removal from my life. The one whose honesty was a blessing but whose honest statements – “I don’t love you.” – took something from me.

I technically won the break-up. I won. I found another boy who loves me against the odds. Not even he expected it. He never expected to glue me back together or reteach me how to feel comfortable extending my thoughts to another person. He doesn’t know how much he holds me together today. He had never met someone who had their world shatter; he has never felt it for himself.

I can never tell him how I was really destroyed.

I can’t tell him that I still hold back the small facts and quirks about me, like how I learned to love superhero movies by watching them with my dad, or how my grandma taught me to eat in spite of calories, or how I worry about trying to pursue a career I love when my family needs security first. He could leave me.

I don’t share my favorite things, like Cary Grant movies, library cards, junk reality TV, John Mullaney stand-up, TEDTalks, or powerful writing, even my own.

I can’t broach my future, even if I can only think the career/living/wedding/vacation possibilities that warrant the hard work. The memories still play back the conversations we had about these topics, like a resilient record player withstanding tests of time.

I don’t correct him when he states that he knows me. He admits that I know him better than most, and it tears me apart that I still hide from him.

And I tried to reassure him, I really tried, when I told him you had texted me after a year. I told him that you said you still had feelings. He worried; he knew he was a result of the “after-effects of him.” And I let him know that the reason I told him about your re-entry to my life was to reassure him. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing’s changed.

But here I am, writing as a result of the after-effects of you.

You unknowingly destroyed me, broken into pieces that I can only keep to myself for paranoia’s sake, and I may never trust them in someone else’s possession again.