Healing

Dear you,

Each day I taste your name less on my tongue.

I can’t remember your smell anymore.

The feeling of your hand in mine fades more with every sunset.

Sometimes I feel a sense of peace and rightfulness in our severing.

Sometimes I get lost in trying to understand what happened, constantly asking myself how.

How did we start in so much love and end in so much distance?

Sometimes I imagine you with someone new, someone who can offer you all the things I cannot.

Time.

Priority.

A family of your own.

Those moments are the hardest.

I feel a white hot jealousy imagining it, all that I wish we could have together.

Loving you has changed everything.

The whole game.

Or not.

It’s not actually a game, and maybe that’s something I learned from us.

Loving deeply, devoting myself to someone who isn’t my husband.

It was a lot.

And, for us at least, too much to sustain.

I wonder now, whether I want to do that again.

Whether I can do that again.

I started this journey so desperate to share the love in my heart, but not yet understanding how to do that responsibly and ethically.

You met me there.

In the depths.

You jumped in headfirst and shared your heart with me.

I will always be so grateful to you for that, even if it didn’t last.

I wanted to experience deep love outside of my marriage, and I did.

Thank you.

I wish you hadn’t promised so many things you couldn’t follow through on.

I wish you hadn’t promised to let me into your process instead of shutting me out.

I have a lot of wishes, but I know they’re unfulfillable now.

It cuts like a knife when I picture you with your future wife, but also I want that for you.

You hurt me, devastated me, left me.

But I still want you to have everything you want and need in this life.

Maybe someday it will stop hurting.

Maybe someday I’ll hear from you, happy and healthy and thriving.

And it won’t destroy me knowing someone else brought you that contentment.

I hope I can get there.

I want to get there.

For now, I’m just healing.

Processing.

Grieving.

Releasing.

Metabolizing.

Integrating.

Clarifying.

Accepting.