I want to text you so bad

To tell you What Loving You Cost Me

I don't know if I'll ever send this.

Maybe I'm writing it because there are things my heart has been carrying that my mouth could never say without breaking.

I loved you.

Not halfway.

Not when it was convenient.

Not only when things were good.

I loved you through the confusion.

Through the distance.

Through the arguments.

Through the moments when you pushed me away and the moments when you pulled me close again.

I tried so hard to understand you.

I learned your patterns.

I learned your wounds.

I learned when your fear was speaking louder than your love.

I learned how to soften my words, how to give space, how to reassure you, how to stay when everything in me was screaming that I was hurting.

And somewhere along the way,

I forgot that I was hurting too.

I became so focused on understanding why you were hurting me

that I stopped asking myself why I was allowing myself to hurt.

You made me feel like I was your safest place

and your biggest enemy

all within the same breath.

You could make me feel irreplaceable,

and then make me feel like a stranger.

You could tell me you loved me,

and then treat my pain like an inconvenience.

And the hardest part?

I kept trying to prove that I was safe enough to love.

When really,

I should have been asking whether I felt safe being loved by you.

I don't hate you.

That's what makes this so painful.

Because underneath the anger,

underneath the disappointment,

underneath everything that happened,

there is still a part of me that remembers the good.

The laughs.

The conversations.

The moments when it felt like it was just us against the world.

And I grieve those moments.

I grieve the version of you I believed we could become.

I grieve the version of myself who loved you without constantly wondering when the next wound would come.

And I grieve because I wanted our story to be different.

I wanted love to be enough.

I wanted patience to be enough.

Loyalty to be enough.

Understanding to be enough.

But I learned something painful:

You can love someone deeply

and still be destroyed by the way they love you.

You can understand someone's wounds

without volunteering to become one of them.

And you can have compassion for someone's pain

without abandoning yourself to prove that you care.

I don't know what you think about me anymore.

Maybe you think I was the problem.

Maybe you think I overreacted.

Maybe you think I should have stayed quieter.

Maybe you think I should have understood you better.

But I know what I know.

I know how many times I cried and still showed up.

I know how many times I swallowed my feelings because I was afraid of what would happen if I expressed them.

I know how many times I questioned myself after being hurt.

And I know that eventually,

something inside me became exhausted.

Not because I stopped caring.

Because I finally realized that caring about you couldn't keep coming at the expense of caring about me.

So if you ever wonder why I changed,

why I became distant,

why I couldn't keep doing this the way I used to—

it's not because I didn't love you.

It's because I finally understood that I had to love myself too.

And maybe that's the saddest part of all.

I would have stayed and fought for us for a very long time.

But I shouldn't have had to fight so hard just to feel like I deserved gentleness.

I hope one day you understand that my boundaries were never punishment.

My silence was never hatred.

And walking away was never proof that I didn't love you.

Sometimes walking away is what happens when loving someone has become too painful to survive.

I loved you.

I really did.

And maybe some part of me always will.

But I am learning that loving you doesn't mean I have to lose myself anymore.

And this time,

I'm choosing me.