As the Flowers Bloom | ✓

old lovers | an open letter

A secret fear: I still love you.

I will always fear, perhaps, that you retain some stubborn, unacknowledged hold upon my heart. I will always fear that one day I will wake up in the morning and look at the man asleep besides me and think about you. I will always fear the ways I am damaged by your absence, even while I know without pause or hesitation that I love someone else.

Old friend, I fear that I will always wonder about you. I fear I will always care.

And you—you do not deserve my attention.

You left me a broken mess. Like an drug, I quit you unwillingly, wishing there was a way to keep my sanity and my addiction at the same time. And oh, how close I was to ruin. If the edge was there, I dangled off of it without even knowing my fingers were slipping.

Old friend, I remember everything. It's not at the front of my mind anymore, but pushed to the back, calmed by separation and unimportant in light of someone else—someone better. But it's there: all of the details, the laughter, the conversations, the hurt, the absolute agony of a broken heart and an ended life—the life I lived with you. I can bring up everything again, and most days the remembrance is too painful to look at. The pain isn't because I miss you, but because I am ashamed that a phase of my life existed that I loved anyone else but the man I love now.

But I am afraid. Because I did. And you were an impact in my heart. 

And one day, when my daughter has her heart broken, you are the person whose face I will recall when I tell her that I know it hurts. 

I will always remember you. I don't think you deserve that.

But my greatest fear is that some part of my heart, the part that didn't die when we left in angry words and tears at night, is still present and living within me. And that it still, in a muted but still very present way, loves you.