A Letter To The Man Who Destroyed Me

I don’t know if you remember me. I am that girl whose universe revolved around you, even though she was just another number for you.

While I was trying to remember who I was before you, I’ve conjured up a whole world made out of questions.

Was I a trophy? Was I just very good for your ego? Or did you really enjoy knowing there was a fool available and waiting for you every minute of every day?

Questions just kept rolling in and out of my head. But a simple one persisted: ”Why?”

I used to keep walls around myself, nothing would get in or out. When you came along, you managed to shine through the cracks in them.

You convinced me that nothing that could possibly be hiding behind those walls, could scare you away. You convinced me you could be my savior and those walls crumbled to the ground.

In reality, I was the one to be blamed. People would call me insane, they would tell me you can never love me. They wondered why can’t I see what you are really doing.

But I might have refused to see. I was simply too afraid that if I turned my back on you, I would be alone forever, because no one else would be able to accept me the way I am.

And I was to be blamed for allowing myself to hope you would save me, instead of saving myself.

I let you inside those darkest corners of my mind, showed you my deepest pains, I let out all the hurt. Your presence in my life was becoming an addiction.

The sound of your voice, your thoughts, your hands around me. That smell of your skin and your hair was intoxicating. I saw it written somewhere that real love is like air or water or blood, it helps you survive.

I could feel your presence making me love you, and I didn’t want to allow myself to need you to survive.

So I told you it would be better if we held our distance from now on. You did not even want to hear about it.

Being so passionate about staying close to me, you swayed me and I believed you. You became the top on my priorities list.

Even when you weren’t there, we talked from the first morning light, sharing every little detail of our lives with each other.

You tiptoed into my life so silently, I never even realized you have become my world.

Why did you have to make me fall so hard for you if you knew you wouldn’t be there to stop that fall?

Oh, I tried so hard to avoid it, but the universe had something else in store. You were always there to say all the right things, leaving no space for doubts.

You persisted until, one day, I woke up and felt my whole world being gravitated towards you, telling me you’re the one I want to be with.

The moment it happened, the time bomb that was this relationship, started the countdown.

You changed. No more long messages and longer conversations. Everything you used to tell me you loved about me seemed to annoy you.

You had no more time to give me and it left me puzzled. It left me feeling guilty, blaming it on myself. I wasn’t good enough. I did something wrong. And I changed.

I would wait piously next to my phone. You had better things to do then to listen to me while falling apart in front of you. You started to think of my constant availability as pathetic. And it was.

While you kept choosing other people, other women over me, I felt you slipping through my fingers, like sand. Every grain of your being I dropped was another piece of me that I lost.

Yet, I was chasing away all the people who dared to say a bad thing about you. I had to defend you. If I didn’t, I would have proved they were right and I was wrong.

I would admit just how stupid and blind I was that whole time. So I lost people that cared about me, too. And then, it was all over.

Here I am now, battling the exhaustion it brought to my mind, my heart and my body even. All that time I spent thinking of excuses to keep loving you took all the strength I had.

I used to be stubborn and proud, but in a way that would never let me disrespect myself for anyone. I have finally realized that loving you was all about disrespecting myself.

It is the only way that any sane woman could ever love you, by stepping on herself first. And I walked all over myself.

When you left, you let me know you thought all of it was a mistake. I hope you will live to feel what it’s like when a person, that you considered the best thing that ever happened to you, tells you you were the worst that happened to them.

I hope you will find yourself a ”you”, a person that will get to you so bad. When you feel it on your skin, only then you will be able to understand the depth of pain in those words coming out of me while I tried to tell you how much you broke me, but to no avail.

I cried myself to sleep for so long. Screaming, and kicking even, from all the despair and rage building up inside of me.

All I wanted was for you to come back and fix it all. Fix the hurt you buried inside me. Reverse the betrayal.

The cheating, the lies, the false promises. I felt like there was a murder happening in my bed every night. And it was me that was being murdered.

The worst part was, I still loved you. After all you did, my stupid heart would have given you another chance if you came back and tried to fix it all. I couldn’t convince it that the man I loved did not exist.

I didn’t know how to explain myself that you only looked like the man I loved. That the character I fell in love with was only that, a character you made up and brought to life.

I still loved you, but I found it in me to cross you out. To burn every single memory I had of you and every single connection we shared.

I am moving on, but I can promise you one thing. None of those that come after me will love you with a heart as pure as mine used to be. Something in the way she kisses you will be familiar.

When you need a hand, someone willing to listen and understand without judgement, you’ll find yourself missing me. All those years I gave you, they will come back to haunt you in the form of our favorite songs.

You will keep coming across movies we watched together, places we visited and my laughter will still linger there. Only, it won’t matter anymore. I have erased you long ago.

I put up barriers to prevent you ever getting to me again. And I blocked your number and all of your social media.

I made sure there is no one to tell you anything about me, if you ever thought to ask.

I figured out my worth. And I decided to never lose myself again for a man, any man. But I will not settle.

I deserve someone to love me as madly as I loved you. I realize now, that when you left, it wasn’t me who lost, it was you.

So, I want to thank you because you did end up saving me, but from yourself.