i've chosen to love you like this

 For about the first nine months of my 21^st year, I used to write letters to the same person. Repeatedly, I would type up these long drafts of letters, and hope that I could release all the words and feelings that were jitterbugging in my head and mouth, out of my system. I sent some of them, but quite a bit of them are still tucked away quietly in a folder on my computer. I have a hard time reading them now.

 All the letters would always start the same, with me talking about how much I cared and loved this person, the memories we had shared together, and the jokes only we would understand. After this brief introduction of sentimentalism, I would write a rambling, quasi-apology, that never really did itself justice, and it was just excuses piled onto some long-winded justification about my life problems and character deficiencies. I would say something like “I know I hurt you but I didn’t do it intentionally, or rather, I didn’t think you were going to get hurt, so I am sorry for hurting you”. I would write about my Dad and how his addiction fucked me up. How I feel mature for my age but also stunted, a little stuck. I would talk abstractly about abandonment but never explicitly said ‘I’m afraid of being abandoned, so I hurt you first’.

 I couldn’t say it then.

I couldn’t say it because I didn’t know who I was. I thought I did, I thought I knew myself so well. After years of therapy, years of self-reflection and explorations into my own character, years of trauma and intensity, I thought I knew who I was. I thought I knew everything about me, already. Which is ridiculous, because that journey never ends.

 And I don’t mean that in a deprecating way, or in a naïve way, but in a way that demands experience. I didn’t know myself well then because I had never been through that kind of pain before. I didn’t know what it felt to be this person, this person who couldn’t think or talk clearly, who was so hurt she couldn’t understand the pain, couldn’t cope with it, didn’t know how to cope with it.

I never imagined a broken heart to be that painful. For a long time, I thought that it would just feel hollow, like an echo in your rib cage that bounces slowly across your chest. Once, as a kid, I asked my mom if she ever had a broken heart and in a moment of wisdom she said ‘only you can allow yourself to have a broken heart’. It took me, at 21, a long time to realize only you are in control of your pain.

Nowadays, I still write frequently. I still romanticize the people who walk into my little life, who treat me with respect and make me laugh, and even the ones who hurt me, and make me angry. I romanticize pretty much everyone. I still seek and find love, make irrational decisions, say crazy things, believe lies. I still fuck up.

I fucked up when I didn’t communicate to you effectively, when it looked like I was leading you on with something, and then I didn’t deliver. I wasn’t being honest then, and I certainly wasn’t being thoughtful last weekend when it looked like I was parading her around you. I didn’t mean it. That’s all on me and you have every right to feel hurt. I’m not going to apologize for being happy, or finding someone that isn’t you, but I am sorry that I caused enough damage that removing me from your sight of vision was your only option. The fact that you felt that way makes me feel awful, and guilty.

I am sorry that it came to that. I still have a lot to learn.