Years ago, when we finally stopped talking or more honestly, when he moved on and left me suspended in the silence he created.
I began seeing the truth hiding in the words of others. Fellow writers. Anonymous messages. Uninvited honesty delivered straight to a heart that was still learning how to read.
Painfully accurate doesn’t even begin to cover it.
He summarized me—us—the time we spent tangled together,like I was barely three sentences…three small lines in a journal he was already done writing in.
Before I realized I was the story being erased, oh how I was hanging on to him with everything I had. I thought I was misunderstanding love, friendship, promises and what it meant to matter to someone. But I see it clearly now:
I didn’t misunderstand love.
Because he taught me that a broken heart and broken promises feel identical, that hope can bruise deeper than rejection, and that the end of us was written long before the beginning ever started.
To me I was more than the three lines he summed us up to.
The book was about something didn’t know yet would be that of heartbreak and false promises are two separate languages; and that he was fluent in both.
I was forced to learn a dialect of hurt I never asked to speak, and only years later can I finally translate the words he was too afraid to say out loud:
1. “I called her and maybe I should never have. I gave her hope I shouldn’t have.”
Translation: I liked the comfort of you missing me, but not the responsibility of loving you back.
2. “She loved me with all she had and she has a great body, but we wouldn’t have worked out in the long run.”
Translation: You were enough to look at, enough to touch, but never enough to choose.
3. “She thinks she understands me and wants to be in my life, but she isn’t the one I want or need anymore. I just don’t know how to tell her.”
Translation: You saw depth in me I never had the courage to live up to. You loved me despite the coward I was.
I spent years thinking I was the one who didn’t get it. Turns out, I understood everything.I just couldn’t understand why I was begging to be kept by someone who was already letting me go.
I was trying to read a story written in a language I hadn’t learned yet even though the translation was sitting in my hands the entire time. Now I know better than to keep trying to decode something that refuses to make sense.
Not because love is confusing, but because I know now to never keep trying to read something I don’t understand.
Maybe it means I’ll settle in life, or maybe it means my greatest love is still waiting to be written.
The next chapter is mine to choose.
And I finally speak the language of letting go
194 days until my wedding, and I’m focused on healing my bruised and battered heart. Here’s to learning to read the language of healing and letting go///c.a.t with help from a writer no longer on Tumblr.
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