Walking into 2023

 It comes in waves, really. They were right about it.

One moment you thought you’d be fine without them, but some nights it just comes creeping. The times you’ve shared with them, the deepest secrets you’ve opened up and showed them, the vulnerable parts of you that you’ve trusted them to take care of. It sends a lump in your throat, and you just can’t stop wondering why things had to turn out the way it did.

I walked into 2018 not knowing I’d meet him. A soft-spoken man who made me feel included, protected, loved and cared for. I looked up to him, he was my best friend, we shared interests and jokes only we could understand. I felt understood, I felt heard, I felt that the Universe finally sent me someone who understood my humour and thought that I was cute and lovable.

How did things just crash and vanish, I really don’t know. If you say it’s a lesson, that that’s the way of life—that the temporariness of everything is what makes it special, well to be honest after six months without him I still can’t see it that way.

While I understand that impermanence is part of life and sometimes you just can’t stop someone from leaving, nights like tonight I still wonder why it all had to happen, why I had to meet him, why I had to share my special bits with him, because the memories pain me so much. The way we shared that bond, and in the end turn into strangers like this, the way I’m dying to know whether he still thinks of me the same—this silence, the days when I miss him so intensely and would kill to hear his voice again, to hug him and to giggle with him over a stupid joke we share. 

I don’t understand anything about how this could happen from the start. And I’ve spent the last half of 2022 without him, somehow. Walking into 2023 without him shouldn’t pain me this much, but the hurt is still there, lingering, like a ghost, a black figure, jeering at me over my mistake of trusting a man who in the end didn’t fight to choose me. 

Will it get easier? I hope so. I want to believe it will get easier, that I will find someone better, that I will forget him. I want to stop clinging onto the memories ai had with him. 

This year, I want to heal. I want to experience kindness, I want to be reminded it’s ok to have made that mistake of choosing someone who in the end abandoned you. I want to forgive and let go, and stop fighting against something I have no control over. 

Forgive me, Universe. I just want a life filled with love.