often times

when I am laying alone at night

I feel his presence with me

and my love for him is overwhelming

it beats within my chest

so hard I worry it may break my heart

He asked me if my heart is tired
I told him it is
But those who are tired eventually wake
My tired heart will be just fine

What a beautiful gift to have the ability to be happy in the hardest of times

When you're involved with someone, you slowly collect these little pieces of their life. The 40 minute break that they have between their classes on Tuesdays. The amount of sugar that they like in their coffee. The time that they wake up for work on Monday mornings. The side of the bed that they prefer to sleep on. And then this day comes when everything comes to an end. However, these little pieces stay with you. You feel so incredibly empty while you drown in the fragments of their day-to-day life. Suddenly, you find yourself wandering around aimlessly for 40 minutes on Tuesday afternoons. You don't put sugar in your coffee anymore. You sleep in on Monday mornings. You lay in the center of your Queen-sized bed. You float around in this uncomfortable space between the life you lived before and the life you shared with this person and their little pieces. You float here for a while as you try and get back to a life that is all yours again. A life that is familiar and forever different. And you know that this will happen time and time again, you will repeat this agonizing process of building up and tearing down and rebuilding until that one day, where nothing comes to an end.

They asked me what happened. They asked me what went wrong. For a long time I wondered the exact same thing. Where did everything go so wrong? Lots of things went wrong in the passing time of our breaking love. But the truth? The very painful truth to our final collapse is this: I could no longer stand by and watch him slowly **** himself while we both pretended that nothing was wrong. Every morning that we woke up, I woke up beside someone who was wishing that they didn't, and it ripped my heart out of my chest and threw it onto the floor while the sun streamed through the windows. Watching him be unhappy was the hardest thing I ever had to do because into my eyes he could admit he wanted to die, and still walk away and refuse to do anything about it. Some people may disagree with my choice to leave him. He certainly did. Abandonment is what he called it. However, I put my everything into trying to mend his broken heart, while in the process I was ruining mine. I would not let us both be broken. God, did I ever love him so much that it almost killed me. You can say that I did a lot of things, but abandoning was not one of those things. I couldn't wake up one more morning holding my breath hoping that he was still breathing.

Chloe Elizabeth

The painful truth that I could not bring myself to tell him is that I cannot bear to be with someone who is unhappy. I could no longer look into his eyes and search for happiness that was not there. I could no longer fall asleep in is arms to wake up in the morning knowing that he would rather not wake at all. I could no longer wait for the day to come when he discovers what it means to be happy, because I am already there and I could no longer slow my pace waiting for him to catch up. Life started to stand still as I found myself engulfed in a person that was not capable of giving me what I really wanted from them, and as much as they told me I did, I could not give them what they needed either: happiness. Upon this realization, I had to let go. I had to say goodbye. All I can hope is that one day, one day soon, he will not have to pray for his life to have meaning, he will realize that it already does.

Goodbye J.S.

By Chloe Elizabeth