You learn your lessons every day in this life; the harder lessons are the ones that teach you to be stronger. The battles you fight quietly because the world wouldn’t be kind to you if they knew.

You loved me so much, why did I have to throw it away?

I don’t like comparisons, but no one has ever loved me the way you did.

I had a vivid dream where I found a box washed up on a shore filled with your pictures. Which encouraged me to find you, and I do, and it wasn’t easy but I do and I tell you how sorry I am.

But then it gets complicated the way it always does. There was someone else I had to come clean to, tell him that you have my heart and this is what I must do. So I do, and pray you welcome me with open arms and love.

And then I wake up. And you’ve never been further.

All those years with you now seem like the dream, it hardly feels real anymore. You’re so far gone; we can’t be the same people who loved and hated each other so much. We’ve alienated each other to the point we doubt we ever existed.

I’ve had this problem with almost every man I’ve dated, and I don’t really understand why. 

I don’t really see myself as someone so very accessible. Sure, those close to me have access, but for someone I don’t know? That would take time and effort, as it should, right?

And then it reaches a point where they have constant access to me, and I’m available.

And now they’ll hate the fact that I am, they’ll hate that I’m so accessible in a sense.

Which can only really mean one thing, they loved the idea of me, from afar. But up close, I elude my mystery and become a little too real, flawed and human even. 

When you find yourself constantly diffusing who you really are, to be desired by someone. It means you like them beyond help, but doesn’t that also mean they aren’t the one for you?

You wouldn’t have to be less you, with the person that is meant for you. Because they’d love you for the way you’re. Wouldn’t they?

I wake up sweating.

I’ve been restless and uneasy. It feels like the storm after such calm. Some nights I slowly lose my mind over what I really don’t know. Little things add up, the past continues to haunt me. Nightmares of faces I once loved hunt me down to my last nerve.

Is my cycle close? I wouldn’t know; I’ve been late for months. Work is nuts, classes are fun, but I struggle to keep up. Why does life throw you in so deep out of nowhere?

Nothing’s really happening because everything is in my head. Am I now gaslighting myself? Maybe a bit, but then what’s real?

Are the voices in my head coming back? Healing isn’t linear; my therapist said it too. Now I believe it. What’s eating me away?

I was a girl who saw myself through the eyes of other men. I didn’t exist for me; I existed for them. I saw myself through them, had no identity of my own except the identity I formed with them. And this created such a chaotic personality; that’s where the borderline tendencies come through, I’m told.

Besides all that, I’m grateful for the last few months. My head was in a better place most days.

Grandma passed away. Her flesh flashes before me every night when I try to sleep. I think of her in vain and miss her. My earliest memories were around her.

Life is a funny little experience; its only guarantee is that it ends. Our existence is merely waiting for it to happen. Because it’s only then we truly rest, we are at peace. The world is too cruel for most of us.

Death used to creep me out; it still does. I couldn’t be around dead people; it was too heartbreaking of a thing. But now I kind of see the peace in it. We grieve our loved ones, but we also celebrate the end to their suffering.

So we live our best lives, being the good people we so desperately want to be, hoping to win even a glimpse of the heaven we are told exists. It does, I’m sure, even though this life seems so bleak most of the time. And maybe that’s why it’s so bleak. So the triumph of the end is otherworldly.

You’ll only know when you make it.

And that’s my stop. I’ll get off and maybe forget I ever wrote this.

My phone occasionally shows me pictures of us, the ones I never got around to deleting, not because I hold them closely, but simply because it’s too much work and I never got around to it. I hate the way I looked with you, sleep-deprived and tired, dry skin and just a girl who was constantly neglecting herself. I think that was why it was so easy to let you go. Well, it wasn’t easy at first, but once I got around to it, it was. I wasn’t loving myself with you, and you never cared for it.

Thank god for some endings.

Life has passed me by, and what I’ve come to realize is that although I’ve written of love for as long as I can remember, I now realize I might not have loved at all. These flawed feelings can’t be what love really is.

I hate it when men approach you with no intentions. Like, what’s the point?

What’s the point of nice dinners, long walks on the beach, and conversations that stretch into the late hours of the night if you have no intention?

He’s too confusing. And when a man confuses you, it means he’s confused about you too.

If they’re sure about you, you’ll know. They’ll be eager to make it known, afraid they might lose you.

And if they’re not afraid of losing you, they don’t want you enough.

Even though we’re raised to believe in happy endings, the bitter truth is not everyone finds one in this lifetime.

So, we end up settling eventually.

And those of us who are too stubborn to settle and fiercely loyal to our hearts, often end up alone.