I Don’t Like Living Without You, But I’m Doing It

Most days you cross my mind. To be fair, it’s rare that I don’t think of you.

I wonder what you’re doing and who you’ve been spending your time with. I wonder what obstacles life has thrown at you since we last spoke. I wonder if you’re still working that job you hate or if you finally found something better. But mostly, I just wonder if you’re happy. And my mind lingers to wondering if you’re happy with her.

It’s hard to let go, but I’ve been trying. Every time I type out a text to you I delete it because I know you won’t answer. You’ve proven that to me all those times I’ve had a moment of weakness and pressed send. It’s always the same thing – feelings of regret and emptiness, wondering where things went wrong between us?

And that’s the thing, I still don’t know where things went wrong – I probably will never know, either. One day things were fine between us and then they weren’t. You just dropped me from your life, and it feels like from your perspective it was no big deal because you never once reached out, you never once asked if I was okay, you never once thought to give me an explanation.

And it hurts, it still hurts, after all these months. I can’t make it stop hurting because I don’t know how. I want to let you go, I want to move on but it’s not that easy. You meant so much to me.

You were one of the biggest parts of my life and you made my world better. You made me happy. You made me feel secure. Just texting you made me happy and that never faded.

But that must be where I went wrong. I gave you all the power. I let you have all the control and it shouldn’t have been that way. For those few years I always let you have the upper hand on me and now I’m not sure why.

And when you decided you were done, I just kept trying. I kept trying to reach out and kept trying to get you to talk to me but you didn’t, you just stopped caring. I don’t get how it was so easy for you to let me go, but maybe I just convinced myself that you cared way more about me than you really did because that’s how much I cared about you.

I always pick out the kind of guys I feel like I need to fix, the ones I convince myself are begging to be saved without saying the words. I go for the ones who don’t show emotions easy, who keep everything bottled up, who don’t let people get close because I just want to be the one who gets them. I want to be the ones they open up to. I want to be the one who can help them. I want to be the one who helps them become more vulnerable.

I want to be the only one who really understands what’s going on inside their heads, and I don’t know why.

And I got there with you. And I became your person until you decided you didn’t want me to be anymore. Then you found her, she took my place in your life.

Do you know how that feels? How much that hurts? How I still look back at old messages and pictures of us? How I still think back to all the memories we have together? I think of all the good moments I had and you were always there, for so many years, and now you’re just gone.

Now I can’t even say hi, now I can’t ask you about your life, I can’t talk to you when things get shitty because you’re not there anymore, and that sucks.

Part of me hates you for it, but the other part of me is still hoping you’ll come back after all these months, even though I know I shouldn’t. Because the truth is, I know I don’t need you, but I’m still working on not wanting you. And my mind hasn’t forgotten you just yet.