I don't know if l'll ever stop hoping he comes back

I hope he still thinks about me.
I was in a long-distance relationship for 10 years. I’m 24, and I’ve known him since I was 14. We met on Facebook back in 2016, and it wasn’t until 2022 that we finally met in person. From then on, we visited each other once a year and spent about two weeks together each time. Last year, we finally lived together for 5 months but I had to go back to my country (Mexico) because my Canadian passport only allowed me to stay in his country for 5 months. He was my first love, my best friend, and the person I talked to every single day. We grew up together, experienced so many firsts together, and for so long I thought we were building a future.

I still love him. I don’t know how to stop loving someone who was such a huge part of my life. The hardest part is that our relationship didn’t end because we stopped caring about each other or because we hated each other. It ended because he became overwhelmed and started feeling like our relationship couldn’t work anymore.
He was dealing with debts, external problems, and just felt bad about life in general. I tried to support him through all of it, but he never really let me help. He didn’t tell me what was happening inside his head, not his limits, not his insecurities, not how disconnected he was starting to feel.

I asked him many times if something was wrong, and I believed him when he said it was stress, work, and everything else happening in his life.
When he finally explained, he told me: “I just slowly became emotionally distant until I reached a point where I no longer felt connected at the same level you were.” And that sentence broke me. Because I keep thinking… what if he had told me sooner? What if we had the chance to work through it together? I would have listened. I would have tried. I wanted to fight for us.

He told me he doesn’t want to come back, and I’m trying to respect that. But a part of me still hopes he changes his mind. I just hope that after 10 years, I still cross his mind sometimes. I hope that what we had meant as much to him as it meant to me. I don’t expect anyone to have the answer. I think I just needed to write this somewhere because losing someone who was your entire world feels impossible to explain to people who haven’t experienced it.