An Open Letter To The Ones Who Are Lucky In Love, From The Broken Ones

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Thank you. Thank you for making me believe that there will be someone out there who will buy me coffee for the wrong reasons at the right time. Thank you for convincing me that unconditional love exists and that it will heal all my wounds without any desperate effort, one hug at a time.

If you don’t know me, I am that girl in Star Wars leggings and huge tortoise glasses, trying hard to not look decent so that I look like I am not interested or too busy to have anyone in my life. I am the girl who rushes across the street, to make sure I do not photobomb any of your wedding pictures. I am that girl who has envy and appreciation in her eyes at the same time whenever she sees a happy couple. I am that girl who had her heart broken by a guy who tried to tame her soul and failed at it. I am your average free- spirited, disappointed and more than anything, desperately romantic girl. Like many others who claim to not believe in love, I also watch rom-coms solely because I can relate to the nerdy girl who ends up with an incredible guy at the end. It gives me hope to see the girl was discovered by the guy and that true love did not require all that much effort.

When you are broken like I am, commitment becomes a daunting, unpopular idea, if not straight up stupid. You convince yourself that you will never be healed; like him, the next guy will leave immediately as soon as he realizes you want wings instead of roots, forgetting that birds, too, nest eventually. For all you know, you just want someone to despise all the clichés of love with you and fall for you shamelessly in the middle of all the real things there is to life. You want someone to look at you like you look at waffles in the morning; you want something real. On a Tuesday night, when you find yourself weeping in the men’s deodorant aisle at Walmart, as you stare at your ex’s favorite Old Spice, you have a false epiphany about how no hug or “I love you” can fix your crumbling heart. That is probably the last time you will be shedding tears on that heartbreak; before you know it, you will become this cold- hearted workaholic, until you fall in love again. See? It is just a vicious cycle.

Then the same weekend girls like me run into couples like you and, if lucky, maybe ask you about your love story. Either the girl or the guy jumps on the question, as if they were dying to share their own unorthodox fairytale. They all have different answers; some started with hatred at work, some started with sitting next to each other at a coffee shop and some with just looking up from a book at a park. They explain patiently that there were breaking points resulting from cheating, long distance or even epiphanies about life and identities. They say all these open heartedly, knowing that none of this matters because no matter what you know you cannot live without each other, that no matter what, they love the other person with their quirks, silly expressions and even disgusting habits.  

That’s why I smile at you when I see you across the street, knowing that you were able crate your own unique vision of true love; knowing that regardless of who I am, I stand an equal chance of finding pure, passionate, and fireworks – as deserving of love as everyone else.

Every time I walk past the chapel or a happy couple, I feel a little more healed; I feel a little less resentment for my past. And for that, I cannot tell you how grateful I am that you found love.