This is more of a dual letter. I’m both writing this to you, Ruby, and you, Ethan. Neither of you could most likely care less about me, because you both really did tell me to fuck off in your own ways. 

So, I am going to do just that. This is my last letter to you, Ruby, and this is my first (well, first one that you’ll ever read) and final letter to you, Ethan. This is my final letter, and also my most confusing one, but my breakup with you, Ethan, has left me exhausted. So, please bare with me.

This first part is to you, Ruby, but much of this also applies to you, Ethan. Even though we only recently broke up.

Ruby,
It’s been a while. I do still think about you, but it never feels like a sword going through my gut anymore. Even when I heard you got a new lover; not even a pinch. That’s what time does. Smooths those sharp edges.

After we broke up – the final time – I used to go over and over what I could have done differently to make you stay in love with me for longer. I tormented myself. 

I remember being so weak from crying in the shower, I could barely wash the suds out of my hair. I ate air. I was constantly snotting on a friend’s shoulder. ‘She’s a fucking coward’ one told me as we walked to class that day.

I was young and I felt trapped. I didn’t have the emotional maturity to understand that I had never been in love with you. I didn’t have the emotional maturity to know how to end our relationship with grace. So instead, I dropped a bomb between us, saying that I wasn’t the one for you. Even after that, neither of us knew how to walk away. We tried to make it work for months. You became aggressive and withdrawn. 

A couple of weeks later, you messaged me asking how I was. I didn’t reply. That life feels so far away now, I don’t remember the girl that I was then. It didn’t feel necessary to open that door again. When I say I don’t regret what happened completely, I mean that I don’t regret the result. What happened made me grow up.

Now I know I wasn’t in love with you, but then I thought I was. I remember so clearly how caught up I was in you; those moments were so intense I let them outshine all the people who really loved me and let you take so much from me while you gave so little.

I don’t really wish you had been different though, I wish I had. I wish I had been strong enough to stand for myself and walk away when we clearly wanted different things. I wish I hadn’t pretended that I was fine with how you treated me, I wish I had told you when you acted like a knob and not bent myself backward to be with you. I wish I had told you how much you hurt me and not been ashamed of having emotions that weren’t convenient for you.

I remember the moment I realized I never loved you, and everything in my life has been better since then. 

Instead of hanging with my friends and enjoying my youth, I was in a long-distance relationship with someone who I thought loved and cared about me. So instead I stayed in, saw you when you wanted to (which was never), waited by the phone for you to call when you never did.

The first time you cheated on me was one month into our relationship, not long after you told me you loved me for the first time. 

I was too forgiving of your negativity which ultimately rubbed off on me. We both blamed it on your family, but even after you left your family that personality was still there and you still treated me like shit. I never realized how miserable you were and how unhappy you made me until you left me.

I don’t know why you feel it’s necessary to text me out of the blue, ask me how I am and if I’m seeing anyone. You’ve even tried to ask relationship advice from me but I quickly shut that down.

I’ve grown since we broke up. I learned not to trust so easily and to have my head screwed on at all times. I can now, truthfully, say thank you for breaking up with me. I didn’t have the balls back then to beat you to it. Without you doing that I wouldn’t be as happy as I am right now, writing this to you. I’d like to end with something you once said to me: ”You can love someone and not be in love with them.” You were right. I loved you, but I was never in love with you. I wish you the best. Thank you for showing me that there’s a difference between loving and being in love.

Sincerely, 
Antonique

Ethan, 

You know I don’t understand why you left; You didn’t fully understand it, either. You were good and kind; you supported me; my family adored you. You were the first guy to love me, and keep loving me, and I clung to that for longer than I should have. Because in the end, it wasn’t right.

I wish I had been honest with myself sooner about our relationship. I have a tendency to leave things to the last minute – you know that – but with us, the last minute came and went. The last minute would have been before you found out what I had told others. I’m sorry I didn’t see it and I’m sorry I hurt you. You didn’t deserve it. I didn’t deserve you. I hope you’ll find someone who does. 

I still remember how your hands felt when I held them and I feel ashamed of how much of my heart I tried to give you. Maybe you don’t even remember what I told you that night in the rain.I ’m sorry. I’m sorry that I not only hurt you deeply, but that I caused you to cut ties with some of your closest friends. If anyone asked whether I regret what happened though, I’d have to say no, not completely. 

I wanted to make us work, to right my wrongs, and find a way for you to forgive me. Instead, it became the place I rebuilt the shaky foundations of my independence. The last day we saw each other was just as dramatic as every day in that last five weeks had been. Me, acting like I couldn’t care less, on your birthday. I vaguely remember your friends asking you to be kind to me as they talked to me, but you walked away.

From my Instagram stalking sessions, you seem incredibly happy. Some doors are best left shut; no one needs to see the mess left behind them.

You were great. I can’t wait for the day when I don’t miss you anymore. I know that I’ll miss missing you. I miss your family. I now know that I would have done all I could have to make you stay even a day longer, but that doesn’t mean I did anything wrong. I just loved you more than you ever loved me, and for a lot longer.

From your perspective I bet what we had must seem so simple – we dated, we had fun and then we walked away. 

From my perspective I wish a lot of things had been different, I mostly wish I had shown you how much you made me cry. I cried in secret, I cried to my friends, I cried in the bathroom while you slept. I always smiled in front of you until I finally couldn’t hold it in anymore and cried in front of my mother, who was the one who told me to walk away.

I hate holidays and December now.

It’s been a little while since I last saw and talked to you. I was about to write my Christmas list a few days ago but instead, I put my pen down and sat in silence. Our memories are still vivid, like it all happened yesterday. The moment our eyes met and we fell in love. The butterflies I felt when we began talking and exchanged names. The time you held my hand and asked, “Will you be my girlfriend?”

You had all my firsts, yet I wasn’t your last.

We were both immature when we met but later on, we both realized that love is about accepting each other’s flaws. You were the first one who said “I love you.” 

You were also the first, and still only person to say “I don’t love you anymore.” 
We were together for only a few months – it was full of love, laughs, fear, fights, and hopes. You were everywhere and you knew everything about me. When you walked away, I didn’t just lose a lover, I lost a best friend – my partner in all certainties, until our future became a blur.

There were some regrets. I gave you my virginity, my body, my naked truths. You made me happy in times that I needed a smile. You hugged me whenever I broke into tears. You loved me when I felt like I was unlovable. You were always there for me, like I was always there for you. I hated you for a brief moment when you left because all I could remember were those times you promised to love me forever.

You’ll find someone new and I’ll forget the pain I had. You never saw our future together, though you played me as if you did. I was just a temporary person for your fleeting feelings, but you were the person I wanted to grow old with. I loved you with all my heart and soul.

On our last day, I knew you were leaving for good. As my tears fell, you wiped them off and said “I don’t deserve your love. You deserve someone who can love you the way you loved me.” Your eyes were red, trying to hold back those tears as you left the door. I knew you loved me but sometimes love is not enough.

There are people that aren’t meant to be with us forever – they teach us valuable lessons in life that mold us into wiser and stronger individuals.

I still have a river of tears that haunts me day and night. I couldn’t watch the rain. I couldn’t go to school, because I knew you’d been there. I couldn’t wear the clothes you loved and told me I was beautiful. I couldn’t do anything because every little bit of everything reminded me of you. Again, you were everywhere. You were my mug. You were my pillow. You were my make-up. I’m still so desperate to forget you and try talking to new people. Some fell for me when we were together but I’m not ready for love. Consciously I think “I am healed” but unconsciously the wounds are still deep. Attempting to love again while still in the fog of healing can cause more pain. I was able to accept that you were gone and that I didn’t want us to get back together. However, moving on is not about unloving the person. 

I wanted to move to a new city. New life. New friends. New me. I wanted to teach myself to love again, to fully love my own being. I rediscovered my passion and hobbies which I’d forgotten; my world centered only on you before. 

When we get shattered and broken from our pasts we’ll know our worth is immeasurable. We will never settle for less. We’ll be aware of the red flags. We’ll know what we want in a person. We’ll know how we should be treated.

In life, not everything is meant to have a beautiful ending. Sometimes, the people we meet aren’t for us in the long run. Most of the time, people come into our lives to teach us how to love and there are times they teach us how not to love. They are somewhat taken over by angels to love and help us. Once they have fulfilled their mission and we have learned our lesson, become stronger, the angel leaves and the person moves on like nothing happened – becoming a stranger. What matters is that the lesson will remain in us forever and that is a blessing in disguise. Everything happens for a reason, we won’t immediately know why it occurred. Someday, maybe tomorrow, next week, next year or a decade after, everything will make sense.

All I can say now is thank you, my dear ex. Thank you for letting me experience the feeling of being in love and being loved. Thank you for those times you made me the happiest person alive. 

Aside from all the kind words, I still haven’t fully moved on.
Your name popped up on my phone for the first time in a while. I was searching for a song on my Spotify and our shared playlist appeared. You must have forgotten to delete it while you were erasing every remnant of me from your life. 

When you finally threw away the stale, rotting flowers that you kept weeks after we broke up. When you randomly unliked all my playlists and blocked me on Spotify – something I had no idea was even possible. When you tried to throw yourself into another relationship fueled out of spite and hatred for me – every date reminding you so much of me that you couldn’t help but mention my name. 

To me, you were the villain. The early morning cold when my heater stops working, forcing me to lay in bed all day, the protruding nail on the staircase railing that always deeply cuts my finger, the small scratch on the front of my almost-perfect car, the broken vent in the back of my freezer causing all my food to defrost and eventually spoil, the crooked picture frame in my living room that won’t stay straight no matter how many nails I add. No matter how I describe it, you were the antagonist in my story – the words I shared with all my friends and every person I met. Yet you can’t blame me, because if you were me, you would have done the same. I told my friends it was so out of the blue. Added in tiny lies to make you seem worse than you actually were. Rolled my eyes and ranted when your name got brought up, finding every excuse to criticize you. All because you were my villain. But in reality, I was yours. 

Maybe if you were more honest with me, I wouldn’t just be your villain, but we would be each others’. If you had told me all the real reasons you left, sucking all of the chocolate coating off a bitter fruit before handing it to me, throwing away the sugar, milk and creamer before serving me the darkest roast you could ever brew, would I have understood? 

If you had told me how my aroma suffocated you, replacing the breathable air in your lungs with dark hopelessness, or that the thought of being in a relationship made my heart slow past the point of being at peace to a deadly dooming state, freezing my body into a empty, numb corpse, would you have understood? 

If I had shared my traumas earlier, would you have stopped making them worse? Would you have pushed the center of the relationship to the middle between us by asking if I was okay, or would you have gone on your side, aggressively pulling me to you as my eyes went dark? 

Maybe if I had been more honest with you, the dark hopeless air would have clouded behind me, trailing like a glooming shadow instead of slowly filling every crevice in my lungs. Where I could feel comfortable pulling the cheery mask of positivity off my face to show you how I really felt about everything going on in my life. But I couldn’t be honest with you. I felt the need to hide behind that cheery mask because I didn’t want you to think I was that girl. 

I didn’t want you to think I was a protruding nail, a small scratch or a crooked frame. I wanted to be the blankets that protected you from my broken heater, the stitches that healed your finger, the paint that covered the scratch and the level that straightened your frame. When I really think about it, I wanted to be all these things not for you but for myself. It was my desperate attempt at rejecting all the bleakness surrounding my life, and convincing myself that I could be and am this bubbly, charismatic, optimistic girl that everyone can’t help but like.

When I think back on it, I’m surprised I didn’t expect the breakup sooner. I’m surprised I thought it was so out of the blue and you thought I was fine. But then again, you never really paid attention to my side of things: how I was feeling or what was going on in my life. So how would you have noticed me pulling away, becoming quieter, caring less, giving up, losing hope? How would you have noticed over the sound of your own voice as you overpowered everything I had to say? 

I hope you don’t read this. I hope that you never check up on me, search my name to see what I’m up to and stumble upon this. But you might. So I ask you not to respond, not to text me asking me why I wrote this after you ended it, not to ask me why I didn’t tell you the truth, not to send this to your friends and speak the malice that I know you used to and maybe still spew about me.

I ask you to take what I wrote with something sweet to chase my bitter words as they slip roughly down your throat. And I ask you not to dwell on how bitter these words are and how different they are from the excuses I made up when I left. I don’t know why I chose to write this. But I wrote this for myself, and only myself. This is my closure, where typing it out will release my body of all the truths I’ve hidden from you and even myself. It’s so I can let go of any bits of resentment I hold against you and against myself. With this letter, I hope to one day let you go.

Throughout the time we had together, we created the most beautiful memories. We climbed all the way to the top together, only to slip and fall as soon as we got there. And though I may have contributed to that fall, I tried so hard to hold on to you.

My heart shattered into a million pieces. Eventually, I realized I couldn’t save us.

I couldn’t undo what had been done, and I let you go to find your true happiness.

Our relationship wasn’t perfect, but I loved you so much. All those things I want to be, I can’t imagine with anyone but you. Our life together – it was like Disney World (although I have never been, so maybe not). We ran carefree in this theme park we call life. Holding each others’ hands, we laughed, cried, loved, and we were in awe of everything we experienced. We were children with dreams, and together, we thought about the day when all of ours would come true.

Eventually, though, those roller coasters stopped.

The music died down, the lights shut off, and our magical journey came to an abrupt halt.

You were gone.

Suddenly, everything that was so familiar about life felt so foreign. I am lost without you. All I have left are my memories and dreams of us that I know would never come true.

There are a few things that I never had the opportunity to tell you. Every time I called you, I looked forward to hearing you answer the phone.

I looked at you because I thought you were the most beautiful thing in the world. I didn’t care what you were wearing. I’d look at you and get lost in your laugh and your smile. 

Whatever flaws I believed I had, you loved – How I’d look in the mirror and always suck in my stomach; How I always analyzed every picture we took together and made you delete them, nine times out of ten; how I’d pace around on the phone when you were nervous. Or how about how I hated to be on video? You noticed everything. But you loved it.

You were my best friend. I wanted so much more for the both of us. Sometimes, though, we have to accept the unexpected. Our worlds need to fall apart, so we can put them back together the way they were meant to be. There’s nothing more important to me than your happiness, and knowing you have that means the world to me. Our lives took different paths, but that can never take away from the memories we shared.

I’m disappointed we never got to finish writing our happily ever after, but I’ll never be angry. I’ll never hate you, and I’ll never be dishonest about my emotions. God gave me this amazing opportunity to love. It brought me to so many beautiful places, taught me so much about life and gave me memories I’ll cherish forever. How can I ever be angry about that?

To your parents, your sister- tell them I always loved them as if they were my own, even if I never met your father, and I’m sorry if I never lived up to their expectations. I know how much they love you. 

To you – I’m sorry for anything I may have ever done to hurt you. More than anything, I wanted to spend forever with you by my side. If I knew then what I know now, I would have held you tighter during our first dance and picked a song that never ended.

I’m not perfect, and I never want people to think that I am. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve done things I’m not proud to admit, and I’ve made decisions I wish I could take back. But I loved someone with every bone in my body, with every beat of my heart and every inch of my soul. It wasn’t perfect, but I know for sure I loved in a way that your happiness was always mine. 

I once told you I wish I could put into words how much I loved you and share it with the world; here’s my best shot at that.

Losing you may have been the most painful experience of my life, but it made me stronger than ever. It somehow made life feel real. I lost a piece of me that I will never get back.

I was going through my old texts today and a lot of the stuff in it involved you. I almost texted you.

But then, I remembered that you’re a stranger to me now. In just a week, we went from being inseparable to complete strangers.

I would be lying if I said that I haven’t thought about you or I didn’t miss you. I do miss you, a lot. So many things have happened since we last talked, I wish that I could share it all with you. And there have been times when I picked my phone to text you but, it would strike me then that you’re not that person anymore. It’s especially sad because for the longest time, it seemed like you’d be the person who’ll be a constant in my life.

There are things that I know I shouldn’t have done, same goes for you. We are both to blame for our relationship being as unhealthy as it was. Though it was unhealthy, we shared a lot of great memories and I like to think that it was as good as it was bad.

I’m sorry that we’re not best friends anymore, and that I had to walk away. I’m also sorry if I caused you any pain. Sorry that I couldn’t be your’ person anymore, that we couldn’t do everything we wanted to do.

I’m sorry that I tried to blame you for our friendship coming to an end. I’m sorry that I tried to hate you, because damn, did I try. I tried so hard and for a while it worked, because hating you and being mad at you was easier than missing you.

But then I realized that I could never hate you, no matter how mad I was about what happened. I’m just sorry that this is how it had to end for us but then again that’s life for you, right?
Not everything goes the way it should, no matter how much you want it to.

Thank you for being my person for as long as you were. Thank you for being patient with me while I learned how to trust you. Thank you for the memories that Irs’ll never forget. Thank you for caring enough to break through the walls that I had built. Thank you for being the person I could run to, for being the person I could count on, for being the person I could confide in without any fear. Thank you for teaching me how to love and be loved, for showing me that I can still trust others and be trusted.

I would say that I can see us being friends again in the future but that’d be a lie. It would never be the same again and when I pass by you at school, I’ll choke back a sob and walk away. And although my heart will break a little and memories will hit me like a train, I’ll be grateful for the time that we spent together. They say that some people just aren’t meant to stay in your life forever, and unfortunately, you were one of those people. But they also say that, some people come into your life to teach you a lesson and leave, but the important ones leave a mark.

Well, you left a mark on me and I am grateful that you came into my life, when you did. I also know that you may never see this but, I just needed to get it off my chest. 

I sincerely hope that you and your family are doing well. I wish that you get everything you want from your life, and more. Know that you’ll always hold a place in my heart.

Then you left me. It was on your birthday.

My world fell apart. I couldn’t make sense of what was happening and it all happened so quickly. When I realized there was nowhere else to go with the conversations or the tears, I found somewhere else to confide my tears.

I heard from our friends that you are looking to see someone else. While I cannot wish you to be happier with her than you were with me yet, I hope for both of your sakes you have learned to talk to her honestly and openly.

I haven’t moved on yet, but I know I will eventually.

I always did say I would write about you. This is me closing the chapter, but I know that it isn’t the last time I’ll flip through the pages, wishing I could have done something differently.

Yours truly,

Antonique