how to love myself after you

when there is no one left to love, i hope i will know how to love myself.

you have spent all this time building a thousand futures, and my name does not exist in a single one of them. sometimes i wonder if you understand how heartbreaking that is. perhaps some people only come into our lives so that, when they leave, we learn how to kneel among the ruins and gather ourselves again.

and while you were somewhere laughing, drinking, disappearing into rooms full of new faces, i was alone, counting down the days until i could escape this city.

i wanted to leave because the city had begun to feel unbearably awful to me. i was alone in it in a way i had never been before, carrying an agony nobody seemed to notice, walking streets that once felt like they knew my name.

suddenly, everywhere i looked, there were reminders that belonging somewhere does not always mean it will know how to keep me.

and somehow, despite everything, the only thing i asked of the universe was that it would be kinder to you than you had been to me.