Lost Pieces

Over the past few months, I've been riding the waves of my depression as it rises and falls in dramatic ways that tend to leave me breathless and exhausted. Exhausted in so many ways that I often find myself wondering if I'm even still alive. However, the dark periods of clarity are enough to remind myself that I am, somehow, still breathing and moving about my days as a human being, despite how difficult and meaningless it generally seems with the ever present fog.

A couple years ago, I was lucky enough to find someone that was my support through times like these, my lifeline, and my anchor to what gave life meaning, for what made me understand that I did have a purpose. For a time, I could say that I was happy... or at the very least, content with how my life had gone, despite everything. I knew what it felt like to be loved and to love someone else without feeling as though I was going to be used for it, to have it beaten into me that it was mandatory, or that it was expected of me. For a time, I didn't fear that someone was going to use my emotions against me and make me regret ever being human. He was good to me and he understood my fears and my flaws, my many flaws.

I truly believe that I ruined it and that I am actually incapable of loving anyone. For that brief period of time, I think I was perhaps delusional and had convinced myself that I knew what it was to love someone else. Instead, all I feel is guilt and a hollow pain for the grief that I have caused this person, because despite all they did to help me and to support me through my mental rehabilitation, I have lost that feeling of love that I thought I had. For the past seven months, I have not been able to find that feeling again, nor do I understand where it went.

Something in me broke and I'm still hiding from the very clear fact that I can't feel that love anymore. The utter certainty that I had prior to this and the obstacles I was willing to push myself through in order to be with this person- it just isn't there anymore. I'm terrified to admit this to them, terrified of what they'll think of me if I explain this, or even more terrified of the fact that they'll keep trying when I simply don't think that I can anymore. They simply don't deserve to be stuck with someone like me and I don't wish for them to feel as though they have no option. I don't wish for them to feel guilty for abandoning me, when I've done exactly that to them.

To my dearest and most treasured friend, to whom I was once willing to move half way across the planet to be with for the rest of my short life- I can not express the amount of pain that I feel every day for not being able to love you like I once did. Nor can I ever apologize enough for not being able to fully express why I don't love you like I did, because I don't have that answer. You did nothing to deserve this and did nothing to push me away. I wish that I could have given you more and I wish that some day you'll get all the love that you give in return.

Forgive me for not being able to return the support and the kindness that you've given me- for helping me to understand my layers and layers of trauma. I deeply admire you as a person and I know without knowing, that you also know that something has changed because you've always known me better than myself.

I hope that some day I will be able to repent for my cowardice and some day find the answer as to why I am incapable of loving another person. Even if that answer is not something I will be able to accept, knowing the truth may calm some of the torturous thoughts that I have.

My heart has been broken in more ways than one by almost everyone that I have ever thought was important to me. Perhaps along the way I missed a few pieces. Perhaps I'll never be able to get them back. If that's how it must be, then for my own sanity, I'll try my best to accept it.