Love Was Never What Was Missing

Life has looked different this last month.

I’ve been spending more time with friends. I like them. I enjoy being with them. And still, my mind and my heart keep drifting back to her.

We decided to keep living together. There are practical reasons. Emotional reasons. History reasons. In some ways, it makes things easier. In other ways, it makes everything harder.

I have to keep reminding myself that staying home just to be around her isn’t healthy for me. That even though we’re learning how to be friends, I can’t stop my life to keep her at the center of it anymore.

That part hurts the most.

Because my heart still wants her to be the center of it.

I keep asking myself why it’s only after things end that I can finally see how much love I had to give. Why I can name it now, so clearly, when I couldn’t show it the way I wanted to then.

Maybe it’s not that I stopped loving. Maybe it’s that there was so much safety in our relationship that the harder parts of me finally came to the surface… the part of me that couldn’t stay present, that drifted off, that felt less like a full person and more like a body moving through the day. The part of me whose hypervigilance was always switched on, showing up as irritation, not toward anyone in particular, but in the way I carried myself.

I know I’m a romantic person. I’m devoted in quieter ways. I show my love by remembering the small things… your favorite snack, your usual order, the details that make you you. I show it by rooting for you when you can’t root for yourself, by seeing the good in you even when you can’t see it, and by making sure you never forget how deeply loved and beautiful you are, inside and out.

Over time, though, both of us stopped being able to meet each other’s core needs. Not because we didn’t care, but because those needs didn’t quite line up. And slowly, that mismatch began to erode the way we could show up for one another.

That’s the part that’s hardest to accept:

Love wasn’t the problem.

Incompatibility was.

I don’t know how to stop loving her. I don’t think I ever will. What I’m trying to learn now is how to let that love change shape. How to hold it gently, without letting it consume me.

How to love her as a friend,

without disappearing myself in the process.