I Miss Loving You

I often wish I hated you. That we had an awful breakup, that we fought and I never wanted to hear your voice again.

At least that way, when I think of you now, it won’t be tinged with nostalgia. I won’t fight the urge to text you, just to see how you are. Or miss you, miss the way you used to love me.

But that’s not how it is. I can’t hate you. Because even when I told you I was no longer in love with you, and that I needed to go my own way, you packed up all of my things and helped me move back into my mom’s. Even when your heart was breaking you were still there for me. And two months later, when my car broke down and I called you to ask for help, you drove to come and sit with me and offered to drive me wherever I was headed, even though you knew it was to my new boyfriend’s house.

How could I not love someone like that? Someone so selfless and genuine, someone I had trusted so entirely. How did it all change?

It used to be just you and me, and for a while that was enough. I couldn’t imagine it being any other way, but slowly I started to realize something was missing. I needed some fire. I needed passion. I wanted fierce, screaming arguments and hot, hair grabbing, neck biting, sex. I wanted an all-consuming love, a love that would push me right to the edge of oblivion, but pull me back in instant. I wanted a love as wild and as toxic as the inside of my mind, somebody to run freely with, somebody I could get swept up in. But that wasn’t you.

Oh how I wish it was. How much easier it would have been.

I lay awake at night and ache for the comfort and security that your love gave me. Sometimes I even imagine running back to you, picking up where we left off and settling back into the life I’d grown so accustomed to. I wonder if I could find a way to be in love with you and to crave you, to somehow make it work. But of course I know I can’t.

I tried to for a year, when my desire for you was slowly fading like the ink of names engraved into a sea wall. I was over you three years into our four year relationship and I spent that year fighting with myself because I knew I’d never find another you. I knew I’d only find pieces of you in those that came after. Of course those pieces would never be as special or as raw as they are in you. Just copies, slightly fragmented, nowhere near perfect.

There would forever be a comparison no matter how much I loved them. The words “but he wouldn’t have done that to me…” or “but he would have done that…” would forever be at the tip of my tongue, like poison, choking me with the reality of what I let go. I hate myself for not being in love with you, for not craving you and if I could, I’d change it. If my heart would allow me, I’d love you forever.

So, if you’re reading this I want you to know that my silence doesn’t mean I don’t think about you every day, stumbling about in the home we bought together, because I do.

I wonder what the bed feels like without me in it and if you see my face in every Starbucks you visit, just like I do yours. I wonder if you miss texting me throughout the day, even though you knew you’d see me that evening. Because I miss it all; I miss our life and the future I saw for us, but mostly I miss loving you.