I want to write about you

I want to write. I want to write about you, about us. My mind is so busy, my heart is so full and yet the words won't come out how I want them to. I want to do our love justice. 

Heartbreak. I honestly believe this is the hardest thing I have ever been through and the most significant event in my life so far. And the pain - the pain is so real. I feel this empty void in the space where you used to be. Sounds so dramatic but the complete and utter numbness you've left is unbearable. 

When you go through a break up, you think you'll know what to expect. I've been through it all before and I don't doubt i'll go through it again. It gets worse every time. Each time a little more of you gets taken away, each time you become a little more vulnerable and your walls go up a little higher. 

When we were together, I used to imagine being without you but you can never emotionally prepare yourself for it until it actually happens, and of course you never imagine it is actually going to happen. I don't hate you at all, in fact in many ways I think it would be easier to hate you. I have been blaming myself for everything - maybe if I didn't say that, things would be different now. Maybe if I didn't argue with you that night, perhaps we wouldn't be here now. But I do believe everything happens for a reason, even if I have no idea what that reason is as of yet. 

It's often the minor and trivial things that you start to remember from a relationship as apposed to the significant factors one would assume you would turn to. Missing you is loud, it is conspicuous. It is behind closed doors, it is behind silence and it is on the left hand side of the bed where you used to lay. I wear it like a warning. It follows me around like a shadow. I am cold from your absence. 

I miss you in the little things, in the details. I miss the smell of your armpits (weird, that's how I knew I loved you), I miss the frizz of your hair after you'd forgotten to brush it after the shower and the way it would turn into a dreadlock, I miss the indentation you made in the bed as you left to go to work and the kiss you would give me on my forehead before leaving even when I was half asleep with morning breath and messy hair. I miss you at 4 in the morning when the house is silent but my thoughts are so loud. I miss you at 2 in the afternoon on Sundays when everything is lazy.

I am learning to live with missing you until I no longer do. It's there when I go out and search the place for you, it's there when I think about family events and having to go alone when the little ones are asking for you, it's there when I book a ticket to watch my little sister in her Christmas show and we used to chuckle through the show together, it's there when I go to Bingo and don't have a foot across the other side to play with under the table, it's there when the freckles on my face appear and I remember how much you used to love them. 

One day I will stop missing you. Stop loving you. Meet someone new. Someone better. It won't happen today, nor will it happen tomorrow. Honestly, I don't see it happening any time soon but it will happen. 'Time heals all wounds' they say, this much may be true but I want to know how much time? Are we talking days, weeks, months, years? Relying on time isn't good enough. I want to feel better right now, I want the pain to go away and to stop thinking about the moment we first met, our first date and everything in between. 

It wasn't until I viewed a small one-bedroom flat in the centre of town that it really dawned on me that you were no longer mine. You were mine for three years and I had my life planned out with you by my side. It's strange having to adapt to a whole new lease of life. A life I had not planned for in the slightest. We once did everything together and now I have to be OK with the fact that you are no longer going to leave your dirty clothes on the floor next to the bed, you're no longer going to ask me how my day went at work and allow me to tell you some completely prolonged story which has nothing to do with you whatsoever, no more getting annoyed at you for not spooning me in bed even though it was boiling hot and getting pissed off because you would tell the cat off for crying all the time. 

You no longer being 'mine' is the mortgage that was so close to completion with our names on the contract, it's the letters addressed to us both, the traditions which weren't really traditions but we always claimed they were, it's the half-eaten lettuce in the fridge from the tortoise we used to own together, it's the Christmas tree that only managed one Christmas in our own home.

I do not want to take for granted the tiny, almost insignificant factors that made our love so powerful. In spite of all of the hardships and the difficulties we have faced, I will never overlook the beautifully ordinary moments in between our chaotic love affair. In between the arguments and the jealousy, there was love. Real, pure love. A love that said we could get through it all and come out the other side better and stronger than ever. If love is a verb, a 'doing' word, an action: then you need to work on it every day. This is what I think some people forget. People don't fall out of love - they just stop working on it. 

Love works. Love works if you let it and if you believe in it. This really does sound so dramatic and I am a bit of a drama queen but I do feel like my world has been turned upside down and I want anyone going through or having gone through something similar to know that it's OK to not be happy all of the time. I'm not putting on a front and pretending i'm OK. I'm not OK right now but will I be OK? Yes. That's the difference. I'm not going to rush into things anymore. Happiness will follow me and come to me when the time is right. 

Love has hit me like a tonne of bricks - reality, too. Everything can change in the blink of an eye. One minute you could have it all and the next: nothing. Savour the moments you have with your loved ones. Kiss your partner. Don't hold grudges. Appreciate the little things. 

Don't get too comfortable.