I miss you. A lot. I think your sudden disappearance made the pain of losing you even harder to bear. One second you were there and the next, I wasn’t sure if we ever existed. But I fucking miss you so bad. Like not even in a justified way because you weren’t my soul mate, I know that now, and we weren’t even very good friends. But I fell for you so hard that I knew I loved you after 3 weeks. Crazy, right?
It was stupid to love you, it was a romance with a time limit. We both knew I was only there a few more months before I travelled 3000 miles home and I told myself it was nothing serious, but your accent and your kind eyes and the way you held me made me forget every reason it was a silly decision. And instead we fell so madly in love that I didn’t care it would hurt like hell when I left. Or did we? Because the only love I’m certain of is mine, but did you ever really care about me?
If you did, why did you promise me the world and then ghost me when I moved home? Why did I meet your family and plan a trip at thanksgiving and talk about our future if you knew I was just a past time, a foreign fling. Someone to tell future girls about to make you sound experienced and vulnerable. I should have known it was all in my head when you started avoiding our FaceTime calls, looking away when I told you I love you, more interested in watching movies than talking about my day. But you kissed me so sweetly in person and held my hand like it meant something that I didn’t notice you were pulling away until you left.
I wish I hadn’t met you, sometimes. I sit at night in my empty bed and look at the pictures of you I took and think about how wrong I was to think you loved me back, to think we were real. I messaged you one night when my heartbreak got the best of me and told you that I missed you. And you left me on read. I guess that settles it. I guess we weren’t set in fate and a love story across the ocean and the one person who truly understood you and everything else you wrote in your songs about me. I’m just a short chapter in your life, but you still come up in conversation with every person I meet even though I haven’t seen you in months.
I’m glad I met you, sometimes. I learnt how boys are supposed to treat me, with kindness and dignity and respect and understanding. You did all of those things when I was lying in your bed, sat in your sofa, sobbing on your shoulder at the airport. But I now also know that just because my love carries across the ocean it doesn’t mean everyone’s does. It doesn’t mean it was love just because I saw it that way, just because you said it.
I think I will always miss you, always miss the time we spent together. Always look back at videos just to hear you say my name. Always question what could have happened one of us had been braver, could have cut it off before it died. Before you ghosted me when I didn’t realise we were sick.
You are the first person I have truly loved, truly felt heartbreak for. You were so much more to me than a a fling on my year abroad. Thank you for teaching me some hard life lessons. I hope I make a good story for you to tell at parties.
