I am beginning to understand that loving you was more painful than leaving you. As I’m shedding the skin that you molded so perfectly for me, I realize I was never happy with you. In hindsight, I was only settling for ambivalence and mediocrity.

I was blindly searching for love in all the wrong places. I was looking for someone to quench my thirst for love and intimacy, but you were never going to fulfill my need. I was asking to be loved by the wrong person, because everything felt so right in the heat of the moment.

I was waiting to be loved by someone who loves the idea of waking up beside me instead of a stranger whose name you no longer remember. Someone who would show me they loved me without having to say those three little words for the sake of saying them or to make me happy. Someone who would talk to me about anything, everything, and nothing all at the same time; a love so great that even the silence between us is warm enough on a cold evening.

Instead, I would fall asleep with my ears pressed against the door, waiting for the moment I could hear your footsteps hit the wooden floorboards in the hallway. They never came. Night after night, I find myself waiting to hear your footsteps but am embraced with a deafening silence. I prayed for your actions to finally match your words even though deep down, I knew it would only lead to disappointment and sadness. I was withering for someone who only gave me the bare minimum.

Someone who provided me with just enough affection to remind me what not being alone felt like.

Someone who continued to sweet talk me into loving them until I no longer allowed them to create chaos in my life.

Someone who didn’t mind robbing me of my inner peace.

Maybe I never loved you. I romanticized what we had. Maybe I created this pain for myself; I put on rose-tinted glasses and saw everything that I had wanted to see. I loved you the way I was taught to handle conflict, with my eyes shut and hands over my ears when things got bad. I wanted you to be the one so badly that I began settling for the idea of us, the idea that we could be lovers, but we were never meant to be.