This Is How I Unloved Him

I am not in love with him anymore.

These words resonated in my head as I watched the dim glow of the sunset bask the city lights. This longing for him, these searching and anxious thoughts, the sleepless nights of haunting memories are all gone. I am stunned and unsure if this new reality is indeed my reality. He has been my world for years. He intertwined my words, my actions. His name was at the end of my every breath.

But now when I think of him, he is nothing more than a fading image of a person I used to know. Of something I used to have and that I am glad I no longer have.

In this journey, I realized that I fell out of love in the same way I fell in love. It was gradual at first and then all of a sudden, there was a turn in the feelings of my heart and he no longer awoke the flame within me.

Although my heart was uncertain at first, as if searching for something I had lost, my heart knows full well that he had never been good for me.

He walked away, but it was more than his absence. It was more than the process of letting go. My heart buried him. My love for him died and this fulfilled me in a way that the simple process of letting go never could.

I was fearful for a while. Fearful that although I would be able to let him go, that I would continue to love him. That I would seek new love and find that love, but that a small part of me would still long for him. I feared that I could never be whole without him in my life because he had so become a part of me.

Yet the process of unloving him was one that left me a whole in a way that I never thought could exist.

It gave me value in a way that he never gave because my worth was no longer based on how much attention or time he gave me. It no longer stemmed from how he treated me. My worth and value came from the person I am. The person I always was before he walked into my life.

I fell out of love with him. And with every loosened heart string, I felt my spirit free itself from the bonds of a love that was never true at all.

Nights were no longer lonely, days were not longer empty. His absence no longer haunted me but revealed a beauty in a new life without him. It’s not that I let him go. But I unloved him. And in doing so, I became a stronger, more complete, more authentic me.