This Is How I Convinced Myself That I No Longer Love You

A week after you left—a month, a year—I found myself stagnant waiting for you to stroll back into my life while you moved forward, hanging out with our friends without me. I lost contact with them because I no longer felt like I could fit in. I stopped striving for happiness because you were the only real happiness I had ever felt, and without you, life no longer made sense. This realization made it clear that I needed to move on.

I started by taking down all the frames in the apartment of you and I. The one of us in Colorado hurt the most because that picture always reminded me of the joy you brought to my life, which meant it now reminded me that I was stuck in love with someone who had moved on. I couldn’t get myself to throw them away, but I put them in a box along with everything else that reminded me of you.

I have started hanging out with my sister and her friends, and even though they make me feel old, they remind me what it is to be young, and there is beauty in that. I feel like I’m starting all over again. As sad as the idea may seem, it makes it easier to act like you don’t exist.

At night, when I’m laying in our bed, I force myself not to think of you and I hope that my dreams don’t take me to a place where we were happy. This is the hardest part because I truly can’t control it. I have a newfound appreciation for waking up and not having any recollection of the dreams I’ve dreamt. I sometimes find myself in your arms and I feel like I’m in a nightmare, fighting the warmth you used to offer, yelling at myself to wake up, hoping that the progress I have made in the last few months is not lost.

I have convinced myself to act like you never broke my heart, like you never offered me happiness, like you never even existed. I have trained myself to avoid places we used to go, people we hung out with, smells that remind me of you. I have erased you out of my mind for the most part, yet there will always be that small compartment in the back of my brain that will hold onto those suppressed memories forever.