I Don’t Know How To Not Love You

I don’t know how to not love you. I don’t know how to wake up in the morning and not think of you. I don’t know how to take a deep breath and not smell your scent all over my sheets. I don’t know how to do any of that.

I woke up this morning with the kind of heartache I didn’t think would come back. I thought I had moved past that phase of missing you, of wanting you, of loving you. I thought I had cleared the space in my head and in my heart that remembered you with such achingly strong clarity. I was wrong.

I’m so scared that I’m never going to leave you behind. The heartache I’m feeling now is so different than it has been in the past. Before, with those waves of overwhelming sadness and sudden realization that we were finished – those were almost easier to deal with. That is the type of emotion people write about, the kind of sadness you see portrayed in movies. You don’t see the quiet, slow sadness that lurks behind the curtains. The sadness that seeps in when the voices in your head or in your world are too quiet. The sadness that slowly wraps you in a tired embrace when you’re not paying attention, and holds on tight even when you try to shake it off. That is the sadness and the heartache that envelops me now.

You’re gone again, just like before. I hate myself for putting us through this yet again. I know that when I see you, it will be bliss and giddiness and youthful playfulness – it always seems so worth it at the time. But I ignore the voices that tell me, that reminds me, of how painful it is when you leave again. Because you always leave, and I always know you’re going to. There are no surprises there, and I hate myself for ignoring that.

How do I live with such aching, slow-moving, persistent sadness, when it’s my own damn fault it’s there again? How do I trudge through the muck of everyday heartache, when the only person who could have avoided it was myself? How the hell do I leave you behind when you fill so many seconds of my day?

I don’t know how to not love you, and I don’t know how to not care. I wish I could just turn it all off – stop feeling these things because it would make living so much simpler, so much less painful. If only I could stop loving you, I might be able to leave you in the past where I wish you belonged.