How I Found Myself By Losing You

By

You were my rock. My best friend. You were what got me through my darkest nights, whether you knew it or not. Your smile lit up my soul and your laugh warmed parts of my soul that hadn’t been touched in longer than I can even remember. I wrapped my happiness around your sweetly spoken half-truths and invested all of me into all of you.

You made me happier than I had been since I had been walked out on two long years before.

And then, you were gone. One day, you decided to change yourself. To become a better person. A person who didn’t spend their weekends drinking and sleeping until noon. A person who wasn’t happily at the beginnings of something so big that it was terrifying. You walked out without even a simple goodbye. The texts stopped coming and the meetings ceased all together. I saw you in class or casually on campus, but never at that little pizza place that we haunted.

My hand would brush yours as I turned in a test in the one class that we shared, but I would never feel my fingers intertwined with yours again.

I watched you continue with your life as mine came to a standstill. I drowned myself in whiskey and attempted to fill my empty spaces with others. That was, until one night I cried thinking about you while I was in the bed of someone else. That was the night that I realized that I needed to figure out who I was and I needed to do it on my own.

So that’s exactly what I did. I walked on, alone, with my head held high. I smiled when people asked me about you and said that we had simply parted ways. I took your pictures off of my wall and started the process of getting you out of my system. I’m figuring out what parts of me are actually my personality and what parts of me I put on to make you happy. I’m finding myself, slowly but surely.

I stopped going to that pizza place that we loved. Instead, I go to coffee shops with people who I met after you. I laugh at the same things that you would have, but not because you would have laughed at them. I laugh because I deserve to. I smile and wave when I see you pass, but I’m teaching myself to not ache at a simple glimpse of your face. I read more and I think more.

I form my own opinions instead of blindly going along with yours. I call my mom every day instead of ignoring her calls because you said that I was too dependent on her. I watch Gilmore Girls religiously and don’t even feel the slightest bit silly for laughing. I’ve rediscovered the parts of me that I loved before I wanted to be yours.

I have time to write now that I’m not tangled up in you and I have you as a new muse. I have all of the amazing music that you introduced me to as a background to my emotions and I have you to thank for my love of vinyl. I thank you for my newfound appreciation of silence, which has ironically helped me reflect and come to terms with losing you. And most of all, I want to thank you for leaving me broken. You left me a clone of you who ended up searching this little college town for anything to fill the void and ended up finding herself.

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