I haven’t written for a long time. Maybe because I’m scared of my own thoughts. Maybe because I’m scared of what would come out once I stop staring at this blank page. Whatever it is, something has clearly changed, and here I am, bearing it all.

I think that being human is a predicament cursed to be drenched in complex emotions, confusion, and blindness as we tread this life we haven’t had the decency of choosing whether or not we wanted. And I became more sure of this as I watched myself fall in and out of love more times than I can count. Falling in love with you has been nothing short of that very thought.

I wonder if you think of me the way I think of you. I’m constantly in my head, thinking and overthinking about whether or not I made the right decision the day I decided that it was over between us. I don’t know where you are or who you’re with, but I know you’re at peace. I have watched you slowly slip away and detach yourself from my claws and I still couldn’t find it in me to let you go.

I think that I’m angry at myself for being so dismissive of my intuition when I had first felt the distance between us evolve to being more than just physical, when our conversations felt unrehearsed, awkward, cold and shallow when they once were vibrant and seamless. I was so scared of letting go of the first thing that made me feel alive in four years and I was scared of admitting that you, the guy who once called me a moon in a sea of rocks, have grown bored of me. Admitting it would mean that I have failed to find love once more. That destroyed me.

As I write this, the wounds you left on me have bled out and closed, the sky over me has cleared and my tears have dried. I’m choosing to live fully, to be insane, to embrace the fragments of that little glass heart that you- and those before you- have left me with.

I realize that we, humans, expect our lovers to miraculously heal us, to fill that missing half we were taught we have, to be for us what we couldn’t be for ourselves. I realize that that is wrong, and quite frankly, cruel, to ourselves and to our lovers. How do we build our houses in someone else and expect them to be our homes? How do we accept incompletion within ourselves and then expect someone else to fix it? If we don’t have it in us to love ourselves, how do we want others to love us?

I owe myself a break. I’ll rest as I reclaim the last bit of happiness that I let love steal from my palms. And you’ll watch me, as I thrive and I wash away every last bit of the poison that has been seeping deeper inside me, killing the love I should have saved for myself.

Ahmed Beqqali