I want to look at what she did and feel anger instead of love. I want to tear her from my heart and leave her among the ruins she created. It would be so much easier if I hated her.
I would have burned the world to keep her warm. I would have carried every burden she ever placed upon her shoulders if it meant seeing her smile one more time. And maybe that’s the cruelest part of all. She shattered my heart, and somehow it still beats for her.
She isn’t really mine anymore.
Maybe she hasn’t been for a long time.
She broke us the moment she wanted someone else. Something else. The moment she looked beyond what we had and wondered if there was more waiting for her somewhere else. I don’t care if it was just a message. I don’t care if it was photos. I don’t care if it happened once or a hundred times, if it lasted days or months, if there was one person or many.
The details don’t matter.
Because she did the one thing she promised she would never do.
And I still remember the moment I found out. I can still see the outline of those messages beneath the reflection in the mirror. I can still feel my stomach drop. I can still hear the silence that followed as my heart turned to dust inside my chest.
There was no dramatic shattering.
Just the awful realization that the person I trusted most had chosen to wound me in the one way she swore she never would.
The worst part is that I still love her.
Not despite what happened.
Knowing what I know now, carrying every image, every doubt, every sleepless night, I still find myself reaching for her in the dark.
And maybe that’s what is breaking me. Not what she did. Not the messages. Not the lies.
The fact that I still look at her and see home.
Even when home no longer feels safe.
I don’t want to wonder who she’s talking to every time her phone lights up. I don’t want my heart to race when she turns the screen away. I don’t want to question whether she’s giving pieces of herself to someone else while I sit here trying to hold together the pieces she left behind.
Love shouldn’t feel like surveillance.
Trust shouldn’t feel like gambling.
And yet here I am, loving someone who no longer loves me the way I love her.
Still hoping. Still waiting.
Still wishing that somehow I could be enough for the person who made me feel like I never was.
And I know that’s selfish. I know it is.
Because part of me still wants to kiss you, not to fix any of this, but because some desperate part of my heart hopes you’ll remember. Remember the way I used to make you smile. Remember the butterflies. Remember the way you would look at me when love was still easy and neither of us had learned how much damage a heart could hold.
I want to hold your hand and wonder if it still feels like home.
I want my touch to remind you of everything we had. The quiet moments. The inside jokes. The nights spent tangled together, talking about futures that now feel like ghosts. I want you to remember that I learned every piece of you. The way your eyes softened when you were tired. The way your laugh changed when it was real. The little things nobody else noticed.
I want you to remember what it felt like to be loved by me.
Not because I think it would change your mind. Not because I think it would make you stay.
But because I am terrified that one day you’ll forget.
Forget the way I looked at you like you were the best thing that had ever happened to me.
Forget the way I would have chosen you over and over again.
Forget the way my heart belonged to you so completely that even now, after everything, I cannot convince it to let go.
Maybe that’s the tragedy of it all.
You became the source of the very pain you once promised to protect me from.
And somehow, despite all of that, when I close my eyes at night, it is still your voice I want to hear.
Your arms I want around me.
Your love I keep searching for in places where it no longer exists.
I think that’s what hurts the most.
Not that you chose someone else.
Not even that I lost you.
It’s knowing that if you turned around tomorrow and reached for my hand, my heart would still recognize you as home, even after you burned it to the ground.
