Sometimes, the people you love deeply won’t love you the same way they did last summer. Or your best friend won’t spend time with you the way they did six years ago.

It will burn a hole in your heart. An aching feeling in your chest will grow and won’t go away, like a ceaseless stabbing. You breathe in sharply, and wait for another and then another. You wait for the pain to end, watching the numbers on a clock dance in frustration, hands ticking.

You feel like you’re stuck in an endless highway, in between vehicles flying past you. You feel like you have nowhere to go. Wandering hopelessly, you try to scream but no sound comes out.

“I’m fine“, you’ll say to yourself and spend another day pretending you are. Those days become weeks and then months. Soon, you find yourself in a dark place. You ask yourself what went wrong and all the memories will come flashing before your eyes. You can’t find the broken train tracks. You can’t find the mistake.

They left you with so many questions unanswered that you start to ask yourself if you really deserved to be left as an incomplete quest. They held your hand so tightly in the beginning only to let you slip through their grip in the end. You start feeling sorry for yourself and feel as though you will never be able to recover.

But, darling, you will. You will get better, things will improve and you will be okay.

So do not feel sorry for yourself. They left you not because you are undeserving of their love; they left you because they cannot handle the power the love you can return holds. They are terrified of its capacity to heal, mold and change them.

You might constantly think that they were the sun and they had deprived you of their warmth.

But, darling, you are your own sun. Your light and presence feed this entire universe. And those who are too frightened of your wonders will never come close. It doesn’t make you any less than who you are.

Right now, you may feel lost in all your tangled thoughts, overthinking how someone you trusted with every fiber of your being could ever abandon you, but you will find a good reason why you should maneuver yourself back on the right track.

They won’t randomly take pictures of you anymore or watch you lovingly when you aren’t looking. It will hurt and feel as though the pain sees no end.

But know that you are not a reflection of their fears. You are not the lost battles. You are not an apology. You are not a sad song. You are not a rejected chapter of a story. You are not incomplete poetry.

Regardless of what everybody else thinks, you are never just one piece of a thing. You are whole and complete on your own. You are beautiful in every possible way that you can be. You are worthy and loved. And you are all these things at once.

So forgive yourself and learn to love the masterpiece that you are because being abandoned doesn’t mean you can never pick yourself up and find yourself again.