I’ll Always Remember The Heartbreak, But Someday I’ll Forget The Boy Who Caused It

Someday, I’ll forget you.

I’ll wake up in the morning and struggle to remember the smell of your breath, the sound of your voice, and the touch of your palms on my back.

What’s left of you in me will loosen like honey being washed away from glass. And I’ll be grateful that finally, you’re gone.

I’ll never think of the jealousy in your compliments or the judgment in your questions. My brain won’t hold the pain from your words. Because I’ll be free.

I don’t know when this day will come, but I feel it in my marrow; it’s coming soon. Each day I try to remember your laugh and your lips and your eyes, just to see if you’re still there. Vivid memories of the days I’d sink to the bottom of my closet floor, clinching your letters and sobbing, sobbing for I missed you and hated you and feared you’d always have a hold on me. 

That I’d never be whole again.

But as the days and weeks and years have gone by, you’ve begun to leave my body, and I can laugh and cry and rejoice and dance because I’m not burdened by your gaze. I smile in the mirror, sing to the radio and stop looking behind my shoulder, for I don’t wonder if you’re watching. I wish that carefree spirit lasted longer…

But like all good things, some days it’s too good to be true, and I’m catapulted back to the time in your basement when you threw me out on the back porch in the freezing cold because you were done with me. And the time you yelled at me in the parked car at the mall and I was convinced I’d betrayed you.

And suddenly I’m 17 and alone and believing this is love—the only love I deserve.

Now I’ve grown up and experienced true love, unselfish and unassuming and blissfully optimistic, and I snap out of the trance you put me in, and I wake to see specks of you floating away with the wind.

You’re not gone, not yet, not completely, but it’s getting nearer. I close my eyes and can’t picture your bedsheets, can’t hear our favorite song, can’t remember your birthday.

I’ll always remember the pain, but someday I won’t remember the boy who caused it.