I WAS NOT BUILT TO SURVIVE LOVING HIM

Love did this to me.
Say it slowly,
Say it like a confession,
Say it like a wound you keep touching just to prove it’s real.

Love did this to me.
It hollowed me out and left my name echoing inside my own chest.

Being in love with him,
Was trusting something I could not survive losing.
It was building a life in my head,
Before checking if the ground beneath us was solid.
I loved him with the kind of faith that assumes permanence,
With the kind of devotion that forgets you might one day be alone.

I loved him with not just my heart,
But my whole body.
The way my breath slowed when he was near,
I let him become my calm,
And never asked what would happen if he left with it.
I gave him years,
Years I can’t return or replace,
Years I wrapped around him like proof.
I gave him my youth in real time,
My patience, my waiting
My belief that staying meant safety,
I loved him the way people love when they don’t think they’ll ever have to start over.

Now look at me,
Negotiating with silence,
Measuring space beside me in bed,
Learning the cruel geometry of absence.
The bed doesn’t miss him,
My body does.
My body remembers him,
Like a scar remembers the blade.
It wakes up searching for him,
Before my mind has time to intervene.
It aches without permission,
It betrays me nightly.

This missing is not romantic,
It is animal.
It claws, it shakes
It makes me feel unhinged,
Like I am grieving with my skin peeled back.
Some nights I swear my bones lean toward him.
I thought I could not live without him,
I didn’t exaggerate that.
I meant it in the most literal way,
Depression took that thought and made it law,
It convinced me my life had an expiration date the moment he left.

Love broke me not in a poetic way,
But in the way your mind turns against you.
In the way mornings feel hostile,
In the way survival becomes exhausting,
It dismantled the version of me that believed love was always gentle.
I moved through days like someone already half-gone,
Existing felt like an insult to the love I had lost.

And still,
This is the part that ruins me the most,
I would choose it again.
Knowing the cost, the aftermath
Knowing how far I fell,
How close I came to not making it back.

I would choose the way he held me,
The way being loved quieted the world for a moment.
I would choose the safety I felt,
I would walk straight back into the fire,
Just to feel warm again, just to be chosen again
Just to be held without having to ask.
Love destroyed me,
It shattered my heart.

But it also proved,
That I loved without holding back,
That I gave everything I had,
That I was brave enough to risk becoming this.
And that is the cruel truth.
Even broken,
Even emptied out,
Even still bleeding,
I don’t regret loving him.