For every person, there comes a time when you fall in love with someone you’re not supposed to. You fall in love with them against all of the logic in the world. Against time, against reason, against choice. You know just how bad this is for you.

You’ve heard all the horror stories from love veterans that have been here before. But it isn’t the same, because this is your love story, and somehow that makes it different. But you know deep down, it’s just like everyone else’s. This person isn’t right for you. It isn’t that you don’t deserve them; it’s that they don’t deserve you. They use you and abuse you and wring you dry, and the worst part is, you let them. You become so blinded by loving them that it’s all you know how to see anymore. It permeates every crevice of your life with the grayness of it until it’s all that’s left to exist. But you stay. You become a parasite to the little bit of love they throw you every now and then, and you try to sell yourself on the idea that somewhere in this mess, there’s beauty in what you two share. And there is a little bit, in some sick and twisted way. They are ying and you are yang. The balance doesn’t make sense but it just is. Nobody understands, but how could you expect anyone to? Because you don’t even understand.

You don’t ask how you ended up with a string connecting your heart to theirs. Those are uncharted waters, and they’re way too deep and way too treacherous. So you just continue to love in a way that’s depleting, and pray that someday you’ll get used to it being a part of you.

Eventually, you’ll end things. But you’ll always come back together. You don’t know what life is without them and they don’t know how to survive without the ego boost of your unconditional, if not unhealthy, love. After coming together and breaking apart a few times, you’ll finally decide to stay away for good. You’re tired of living in a life of shadows and fragments of something you want fully and brightly. You want to find something new. It takes everything in you, but you break that string. And you get broken right along with it, because now you’ve lost everything you believed in. You became a part of something beautifully tragic, and when it disappeared so did everything you know. But in the midst of this heartbroken stupor, there’s a subtle, quite promise that the worst is over.

You hope your heart grows big enough to love again. Not the same kind of love, but a better love. Stronger than the first time. You hope that this time it will be for someone who deserves you. You survived the only thing you never thought possible. And with that comes a strength the other person never gave you. A foundation of self-reliance and self-acceptance that was never possible with them in the picture. And for that alone, you regret nothing. You’re grateful for what they have taught you. Because you know you will never accept that sort of sickening, disastrous love ever again.