They may remember my breakup because it kept coming up. Kept coming back. Some may think that my breakup was the thing that hurt the most last year. It wasn’t.

It hurt more to get my heart broken by somebody else.
It hurt more that I had to see her around every time I was around my friends.
It hurt that her name came up everywhere I went, as obscure as it was.
It hurt more that my fondest memories of last year weren’t with my former love, but with her.
It hurt more that I considered my masterpiece of a song to be one about her, and not about my former love.
It hurt more that gazing into her eyes I saw a myriad of puzzles to be solved and a seemingly endless, impossible maze that I wanted to travel in, but never got to.
It hurt more that I bottled these feelings in because I was in a relationship.
It hurt more, the nights I kept up, thinking about what if I gave it just a little more time.
It hurt more to think that maybe I made the wrong decision about who I loved.
It hurt more to rush into love like I did, and miss out on the one thing that may have been better.
It hurt more never to see her again.
It hurt more to forget her smile than my former love.
It hurt more that her laugh was one of the most beautiful sounds that I’ve forgotten.
It hurt more that I stayed up all night thinking more about her than my former love.
It hurt more to know maybe I fell in love with her more than I did my former love.
It hurt more to think about how much it must have hurt my former love to find out.
It hurt more to think how much I took from my former love, and how I threw her away in the end.
It hurt more to use the word threw away instead of broke up in that last sentence.
It hurt more that maybe a part of me still wishes things went differently
It hurt more to feel that wave of anguish to know she didn’t love me back
It hurt more to feel that feeling of defeat to think I tried so hard
It hurt more to feel nothing for my former love, and how guilty I should have felt but didn’t.
It hurt more to realize though, that through all of it, I wasn’t blameless. I had fault.
It hurt more than a thousand papercuts, cutting away, slowly at me. Taking bit by bit of myself.
It hurts most that my break up didn’t hurt me at all. It was her breaking my heart that hurt the most.

It stings now to know
That there’s a part of me that may still love her, wondering if she loved me back.
But now I’ll never know.