Unsent Letters To My Ex

Get your tissues ready, this ones quite painful.

Let me give you a quick background of this heartbreak. So I was with my high school sweetheart for about seven years, typical high school romance. I got kicked out of my parents house because of him, my mom ended up sending me to the Philippines for nursing school but a year into it I left and came back home to California to be with him. Then life happened, we grew out of it. We had completely different vision of our future and we pretty much ruined it.

About a month ago, my phone’s screen cracked I had to take it in for a repair. I ended up using my old iPhone 5 from years ago and I found this letter in my notes.. dated 2/15/2015.

Get your reading glasses ready, this is lengthy.

My dearest Hector,

I still remember the morning years ago I realized I had fallen in love with you. I awoke and saw you on the pillow next to mine, again. I had already become used to your scent, and my body belonged in your bed. I looked at you and I understood I was experiencing a different type of love. It wasn’t based on lust this time, it wasn’t selfish, and it was a love I felt proud about. A love that made me feel purely human. A sense of peace enveloped me. I wanted to learn every motion you made during your sleep, I wanted to understand every pore of your skin, and curvature of your lips, and then suddenly I embraced you. Through my arms I desired for you to feel what I was feeling, hoping it was contagious. Little did Iknow I was embarking on an enormous life lesson. A lesson that only time has had the power of healing, and even still I feel the residue of the scars this lesson left in me. In the cracks between the scars there is gratitude. Gratitude for the woman I have become. The strength I discovered during my nights of solitude. The strength that Ibelieve is only found in pain, because there is beauty in pain. Being in sync with the one you love has to be one of the most beautiful feelings a human being can ever experience. Sometimes I think back to certain moments in my life in which I felt nothing in the world existed but you and I. An incredible happiness that overtakes you, and you can’t help but to smile. A feeling you want to constantly relive, and then one day you realize that life doesn’t give you those moments everyday, and sadly at times those same extraordinary moments become plagued with pain. It seems that during our relationship all I did was forgive you. I forgave you because Iloved you. I loved you ardently, and I forgave you because every time there was a rift you made me feel we couldn’t be apart. Maybe it was masochism veiled as love, but for whatever the reason I felt I needed you. Making love to you was different than with the other men before and after you. Outside of all the passion, lovemaking with you was spiritual. I felt spiritually connected with you. A spiritual connection mixed with pain. You see even though I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you, I knew you wouldn’t be mine forever. Even during the time we lived together, the comfort of waking up next to you everyday never provided me peace. Ialways knew you would never be satisfied, and that we would eventually end. You were always going to want to have it all, and that all also included other women. I’ll never understand, how you loved me but then would lust for others. You and I were different like that. I loved to a point of no return, and you were still learning what love was. We had problems. Anything real encounters problems. But you stabbed my heart when your empty eyes looked at me and said that love was not enough. I became speechless, because to me love was everything. In my life love was you, love was us. How was it not enough? For some time I was convinced you loved me desperately. I was convinced you needed me, but to need someone is a dangerous thing, particularly for a man. At first it is great because you realize you have grown to love your other half to the point that you trust them with everything. I know you trusted me with anything. You trusted me with your fears, you trusted me with your desires, with your work, your life. We were so in sync at one point, that you were my best friend. We were consumed by each other. Needing me eventually became a crutch. A man always needs to feel like a man, or at least the idea. When he finds himself depending on a woman, he starts to feel emasculated. I unwillingly did that.

Part of me wanted to ask you to come back. Part of me wanted to ask you to stay. To stay and fight for me, to fight for us. But a certain ideology impeded me from doing so. The idea that when someone loves you enough, they will stay on their own, without you asking them to. The inevitable occurred, and there I stood alone, and I cried. I cried silently, knowingly that if those walls could have consoled me they would have. For Ilooked like a helpless child, mourning the death of everything you were in my life. The death of my friend, my lover, my partner, the father of the child we didn’t have, and Ifelt a sense of loneliness envelope me, with the realization that you perhaps were right. Maybe you and I could never be anything else but be together. For we had reached a deep, intense level of love, and stories like ours sometimes just end without proper goodbyes. Stories like ours are lived then left to dry with unanswered questions full of pride. We became strangers, exactly what I feared. Although some people can’t be anything else but be together, I always felt that I had to keep some part of you. Even with feelings of anger, loss and failure Iunderstood that erasing you from my memories meant losing the girl I was when Iwas with you. And although I’m not that girl anymore, I want to remember her. I want to remember her spark, and the smile that you brought out in me, the way i used to write about us and how much we love each other. The same way I want to remember the man you were, the man I knew, the man that at one point I had loved so deeply.

A month ago was the first time I have ever read this letter again, it made me tear up knowing how much pain I was in. But also made me really happy that I have healed myself completely from the trauma that relationship caused me.

If I could do it, you could too. Healing takes time, years, but once you reach that point you’ll thank him for teaching you a life long lesson. I found myself, I found happiness.