PART 3: Finding Home Within: The Journey Back to Myself

I told my therapist about you. The first thing she said was, "What was the most inconsistent relationship you had with a parental figure in your childhood?"

Oops. No one asked you to be this accurate, ma'am.Here i was thinking the butterflies in my stomach meant love

She pointed to a pattern I was trying to recreate with you. A familiar dance of reaching for someone just out of reach. Of performing for love that's never quite given freely. She also pointed out that I cannot cower out of this healing, because I hunger to be seen but I'm always looking for it in places that can't give it to me.

I self-censor so much because I'm afraid you'll see me and run. Isn't that ironical for someone who wants to be seen? A walking contradiction.

The healing

1/3

I am erasing your fingerprints from my body,

Scrubbing away the memory of your touch

So that my skin doesn't ache for you anymore.

2/3

My lips are chapped.

My throat is dry.

My eyes are sore.

I'm aching for you.

3/3

But I'm starting to forget what those lingering hands felt like.

The ghost of your touch fades a little more each morning.

It's a self-torture cycle I have to break. I have to stand on business and make a choice that would allow me to heal. This is not what I wanted to hear, not when my body was aching for you every second. But it's what I needed to hear.

I have spent my twenties looking for love in all the wrong places.

Turns out all I needed was a space to speak my honest truth and to be seen.

And I didn't need that from you.

I needed it from myself.

I am afraid you are not someone I get to keep. The fact remains: you are not mine, never was, and I am not yours.

Maybe in another lifetime we'll meet when I'm healed, and this could be our story. Because I still adore you. Thank you for the lessons learned.

But this lifetime is for me.

I'm writing our last chapter. This started out so beautifully, It poured life onto my heart, but this is not what it set out to be anymore.

I'm on my knees begging God to never let me attach like this To anything that doesn't belong to me ever again.

I have to let you go, and you have to let me let you go.

This is goodbye. And this time, it's also hello— Hello to the woman who no longer needs wintergreen eyes to see her own worth.