You Took All My Words When You Left, But It’s Finally Time I Take Them Back

When you left, you took all my words from me.

For months, I felt like I had nothing in my life to write about or to even speak about. I felt like the world had crumbled right before my very eyes and I just let it. I didn’t dare try to save it or at least cry about it when it finally fell into pieces. I was just an audience – I am not part of the world, of all the emotions inside it, of all the things existing in it. I was nothing. I felt empty.

It was the worst time of my life.

I clung to words whenever I was sad or lonely or happy. I clung to them that time I first fell in love, or when my parent’s separation and its aftermath have ruined me. I clung to them when I was bullied of being friendless, of being short, of being ugly. I clung to them when I won awards in the contests I joined at or when I thought I finally made my parents proud. I clung to words every single day of my life.

But when you left, I had lost grasp of these words. I was just a writer with nothing to write about, a person with nothing to feel. It really, really was the worst.

This may be because I had fallen so deep on your vortex or maybe because I had let myself revolve around your world. This is something I shouldn’t have done but it’s been too late when I realized it. You were all I’d written about and all I’d thought about. You were fundamentally the trigger, the stimuli to my words, which were clearly one of the most special things in my life.

Today, though, I’m taking them all back.

I once forgot to get a hold of them because I thought you were more worthy of holding on to. I’ve exchanged my words for my memories of you. But now, you can have all these memories back. I no longer plan on sticking with them. I no longer plan on drowning in your ocean. I no longer plan on thinking that there’s still a chance for us.

Because now, I am taking all my words with me and start writing of everything else but you. I finally learned to breathe underwater and save myself from your whirlpool. Drop by drop, with all my efforts to swim away from you. I am pushing myself to the shorelines, out of your ocean, out of your damned existence. And now, I am burying you here, right inside my heart, because I am not planning to forget about you entirely. Instead, I am planning to learn from you, the mistakes I did, and the lessons you taught me. I now know that I have the courage to fully let you go, to find a new path wherein your presence is not necessary, and to love myself without waiting for you to do so first.

Because along with these words, I’m taking myself back. The self I was before I met you – the broken one, the one who thought life was irreparable and that the world is better off without her. I have written so much about you because I thought you saved me. It turns out that you were just a Band-Aid and now, I’m finally learning to get it off and live with the scars. Because I now know, I can only be the one to save myself.