Goodbye, goof

Hey,

I don’t think this was ever really meant to work out in the long run. I think we were always meant to be a chapter in each other’s lives. The part I struggle with is closing that chapter, because closing it means accepting that we’ll truly be out of each other’s lives.

I know memories stay, and life moves forward, and eventually we will both build lives that no longer include each other. But that’s the part that still gets to me. There are so many small moments; a random thought, something I noticed, or nothing particularly interesting that I instinctively want to share with you. Not because I expect some big reaction, but because even your simplest responses always meant something to me.

When I first spoke to you, I was really young- naive, sure, but also deeply romantic and already very attached to you. So, even when I dated other people, you were always somewhere in the back of my mind. You’ve told me before that I struggle to detach from people or stay fully loyal in my relationships, but if I’m being honest, I think a lot of that came from never truly letting go of you.

That doesn’t justify anything I did, and I’m not trying to excuse it. But, the truth is that those unresolved feelings slowly seeped into our relationship too. From early on, there were misalignments between us. We struggled to communicate. We struggled to understand where the other person was coming from. And over time, that turned into something heavier; pride, resentment, hurt, anger, and we ended up hurting each other more than we ever expected to.

I know I have a lot of healing and growth to do. And the last time we spoke ended in a really brutal fight, where you were convinced that everything was my fault and that I’m a terrible person. I won’t pretend that some of the things I did weren’t terrible. I’m sorry for it and I regret the way I caused you pain.

But I also know that the person I became in some of those moments was shaped by the first time you left me. That was the first real heartbreak I had ever experienced. I had never felt something like that before; feeling completely discarded, like I could be thrown away so easily. It shook me in a way I didn’t understand at the time. I think I used to believe that everyone treated people with a baseline of empathy or understanding. But that’s not how the world works, and everyone is different. Everyone has their own faults and blind spots.

I have mine, and you have yours.

I hope that one day, when enough time has passed, you might be able to look back and see some of the ways you treated me. How you caused me pain and recognize how sometimes, you too could become cruel and cold. Maybe you might see how that also played a role in why things between us kept falling apart.

Part of me hopes that what we had wasn’t some kind of “once in a lifetime soul connection,” and that there’s a simpler explanation for why we keep circling back to each other. Maybe it was attachment styles, trauma bonds, intermittent reinforcement, or all the other psychological patterns people talk about. Maybe it really was just two people who got caught in something complicated.

But, even when I eventually move on, I think a part of me will always miss the way we connected. The way we understood each other in small, quiet ways.

Sometimes I wish we had just stayed friends. Because maybe then we could’ve kept a small piece of one another without destroying us the way we did.

I always imagined that when it truly ended, we would both feel it instantly. Some clear, undeniable certainty in our gut that this was the final goodbye. Maybe you felt it first. But I think I now understand that sometimes the end looks just like every other cycle. The only difference is a quiet understanding, somewhere between one of us or maybe both of us, that this time it’s actually over.

Goodbye.