Sometimes at night, I fall asleep thinking of you, and all I wish for is to wake up without missing you.

I want to remember what it’s like to be alone but not lonely. I want to forget the way your hands feel wrapped around me. And I want to stop replaying the moment when I realized it was you.

I’ve tried drinking coffee at midnight to drown out the sadness creeping in around me, but all it does is remind me of you.

I’ve tried playing angry songs to try to battle the fear that tells me you are never coming back, but somehow, I always end up finding ones that bring me right back to you.

Long drives, endless words, and boundless creativity all sound like escapes until you put them into practice and realize that your inspiration is driven from the one thing you are trying so desperately to forget. The one person who showed you what happened when you finally let love in.

I’m not sure if I will ever find my cure for loneliness or if I’ll just have to learn how to wear it as my new skin. Slightly worn, but ultimately worth more broken in than it ever was before you owned it.

And that’s the thing; you truly have to learn how to own your loneliness. I’m not saying you need to sit around and wallow in it, but we need to stop pretending that we don’t all feel alone sometimes. Somehow, we have convinced ourselves that missing a part of ourselves is wrong. And that we should feel broken when someone else is not there to make us whole.

I have discovered more about myself in my broken times than I ever learned when I was whole. When you aren’t afraid to let yourself feel the hurt, you begin to learn what exactly makes you tick and all of the beautiful things in life which make you happy.

Maybe that thing is actually a person and maybe that person isn’t actually around right now, and they may never be, but what an extraordinary feeling it is to know that even after losing such a monumental part of yourself, you are still here. You are still standing, even without your other half.

Maybe the cure for loneliness isn’t something tangible at all; maybe it is nothing more than a realization that without a little loneliness from time to time, we can often lose sight of ourselves.

Sometimes you really do need to break before you can fully become. And sometimes the breaking can seem like the end. But then one day, you will wake up and realize that you were always the key to healing your own heart. You will always be the answer to your toughest questions. And you will always be okay, even with a little loneliness.