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The day I left, it felt like I tore my own flesh.
That’s not a metaphor. That’s the closest language gets to what it actually was.
I put six years and over 700 miles between us.
He was the love of my life. I love him still.
And every single day, something happens that makes me want to reach for him. A song. A thought. Something small and ordinary that belongs to him somehow.
And every single day, I don’t. Because I know it’s best not to.
That doesn’t make it easier.
I don’t say any of this out loud. Because when you’re the one who leaves, you don’t get to grieve.
That’s not how the story goes.
You walked away.
You made your choice.
You should be over it by now.
But love doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t expire because you were the one who closed the door.
Nobody tells you that.
We didn’t fall out of love. We broke the thing that let us live inside it.
Not all at once.
Not in ways that are easy to explain.
We were beautiful together and we were destructive together. We loved each other and we hurt each other. And somewhere in the years of it, the trust gave way.
Love connects. It pulls. It recognizes something rare in another person.
But it doesn’t hold weight on its own.
Trust does.
Trust is what lets two people live inside the love they feel.
Without it, love has nowhere to go.
And we ran out of it.
Both of us.
I know that now. But I couldn’t leave. Not until I made him someone I could leave.
I turned him into a monster. Slowly, in the way you do when you need a villain and the truth is too complicated. I needed him to walk away, or I needed to believe he deserved to be left.
So, I built the story that way.
And it worked.
And I have never forgiven myself for it.
Because he never understood why I really left. He got the version I gave him, and I have carried the real version alone.
It killed me to hurt him that way. It kills me still.
To know what I did and know he’ll never understand and know the door is closed. That’s a grief with no resolution.
People see a woman who walked away and think they know the story.
They don’t.
They think leaving looks like strength.
Sometimes it does. But sometimes it looks like this.
Like tearing.
Like losing him again, briefly, every single day.
Like carrying something heavy and private for six years because there’s no socially acceptable way to say:
“I left the love of my life and I still love him and I’m not over it and I don’t think I ever will be and I’m not sure I’m supposed to be.”
There’s no container for that grief, so you carry it quietly.
You answer “I’m good” when people ask.
You don’t mention his name.
Some evenings I stand on my hill and look out over the mountains.
And I still look in his direction.
Somewhere out there, past all of it, he’s watching the same sunset—700 miles and six years of silence between us.
And still…
I’m not writing this to relitigate what happened between us. We were both responsible. We were both trying and failing and hurting each other in the trying.
I’m writing this because somewhere right now someone is sitting with this same grief, believing they’re not allowed to have it. Believing that because they left, they should be further along. That something is broken in them because the love didn’t die when the relationship did.
Nothing is broken.
Love doesn’t have an expiration date.
Leaving doesn’t cancel it.
You are allowed to grieve the love of your life even if you were the one who closed the door.
You are allowed to still love someone you can never go back to.
You are allowed to lose them again every day and still know you made the right choice.
You are allowed to be not over it.
This grief is real.
It counts.
And you are not carrying it alone.
~
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