You Don’t Always Get to Keep Love, Be Grateful Anyway 

I will never forget how you loved me, and how I loved you with the same intensity. I will never forget how my heart grew a million sizes at loving you and how it shattered when you left.

I look back at a year when I lost you. I look at the first few months and how those months were a cycle of being drunk, being lost, being sober and finally being drunk again. I counted the days expecting you to come back but that day never came. I look back now, a year later, as I sit through a crowd of people, coffee in hand, and I realized, it was no one’s fault. It was something neither of us wanted, but it had to happen anyway.

All the same, you were special. You were the one man I loved so dearly because you deserved nothing less. You were the one man who knew how toxic it was to be with me yet stayed. You were the one man who called me princess and treated me that way. I knew then that you were the one man I was going to marry. I started building my dreams with you, my life around you until I felt like I couldn’t stand on my own two feet if I didn’t have you by me.

I started living in that bubble, exhausting it, until it couldn’t hold any more air.

I’ve patterned myself into believing we were going to make it. Surely, it broke me when we didn’t. But we were young, we were in love and we were so absorbed in our little world of nightmares and fairy tales. All of which, I realized, were merely figments of the abstract mind deviating from reality.

I understand now, why things had to happen. Our parting was inevitable — predictable, even. One way or the other, soon enough, one of us was going to break.

You told me, “Love isn’t enough.” And maybe, you were right, but I wish we tried. And maybe tried a little more. I will always hold on to the belief that love wins in the end. And maybe that’s where the conflict lies.

But I look at where I am now, and I smile because I know this is why we had to part.

I learned that it’s not always a significant other: a man, a woman, to complete you. Because little things can feel like love, too. Like drinking your coffee in the morning, or talking to a friend at night. The road to recovery isn’t paved smoothly, but it’s as colorful as you would want it to be.

In the recesses of my heart, I will always find you, but for now, I am grateful. I am grateful for the love we had. I know somewhere in between the love we shared, the universe wanted us there. That’s how I know the universe will ultimately take me somewhere.