I Hate To Say It But He Looks Happier With You
As much as it hurts, I know I’ll live on without him.
Malysheva Liudmyla / Shutterstock By Bea C. Pilotin
Love was him. Love was the perfect set of sleepy-hooded eyes and messy hair I used to wake up to every morning. He was the laughter I wasn’t tired of hearing. His world revolved around me and only me.
I was his everything. He held the moon in the vast sky to light up my darkest night.
For so many years, he invaded my heart, my soul and my life. He was always passionate and very generous to my mistakes.
He was the place of my security and strength. This love was good for me and I loved him.
It was so easy to touch him, to brush my fingertips over the gilt edges of his hair and to kiss him. Life with him was beautiful and sweet. Everything about him was unforgettable, and when he smiled at me and whispered the most passionate declaration into my ear, the more I felt the intensity of sincerity and magnitude of love.
To be loved and cherished, I know, are both the rarest of life’s gift. To be understood and cared for are the most ultimate happiness in life, yet he gave all these things to me.
Magic surrounded us every day. He was my Prince, my knight in shining armor, my own constellation and my kingdom beyond the four walls of my castle.
What we both shared was beyond measurable, beyond reason, beyond words and beyond promises. We believed it was impossible to part.
Yet, things have changed.
No matter how sweet the kisses were or how pure the love was, and no matter how fortunate we were to pour ourselves out to each other, nothing lasts forever.
Maybe true love wasn’t in the cards for me. Maybe I wasn’t meant to experience what forever truly felt like.
I realized that love doesn’t always mean forever.
It’s not always dancing barefoot across the kitchen’s floor while admiring the imposing beauty of a cold morning. It’s not always sweet kisses, the ones given while our bodies radiate and our hearts were hammering inside our chests as we huddled down under the sheet.
It’s not always like sunshine, rainbow and blue vault of heaven bounded by cloistered walls, and the green earth extended in the hill and dale to the round verge of the horizon.
We were both pulled apart by fate and life’s unexpected change, sweeping us into new lives and different directions when he found you.
The one he decided to spend his whole life with. The woman he wanted to sit across from a table with during meals or a cup of coffee together on rainy days.
I cannot imagine that he managed to reclaim or reshape our memories with you or that he managed to erase me from his past. Yes, you were the irresistible force that tore our lives and hearts apart.
I hate to say it but he looks happier with you. And I mean that.
There were a lot of questions roaming around my head.
Why do pain and love have to go together? Why do we have to meet people we cannot keep? Is this to remind us of the reality that no matter how sentient we are as human beings in crafting tangibly amazing things, at the end of the day we are still as delicate as all the things that depend on the forces we can’t control?
Ah, there are things in life that defy explanations and it’s difficult to live with them.
There was nobody better than him. He was a part of my life for too long to give that up. He’s a part of me, my body, my soul and my heart. I hated giving him up but I also hated to think that it’s breaking my heart to watch him love someone else.
Sometimes we have to let go, and let the people we love find the happiness and love they deserve.
I still love him and say everything I feel in whispers he’d never hear. The prism through which I viewed him remains with me constantly. He will always be twenty-four and I will always be eighteen.
And even if our story didn’t go on forever, he will always be the handsome prince I promised forever to. There will always be a soft spot for him in my life.
And that’s the thing about true love, it never goes away. It can’t just fade away, not when it comes to matters of the heart. I’m not only going to miss him and what we’ve had, I’m also going to miss those reveries I had for a future that I know will never happen.
It hurts. As much as it hurts, I know I’ll live on without him.
Don’t tell him that my heart is breaking because I don’t want him to know. Take the step that you both want together. But let me live with my own dreams.
I know that I will never forget the memories of a thousand and one days we shared together, and will forever haunt me for the rest of my lifetime.
And here’s my simple message: love him when it’s easy and love him when it’s not. Please take care of him for me and love him as I do. Give him the love I can no longer save.
Let him forget me but please grant me these, let me love him from afar. Let me dream of what could have been. And now that he found happiness in your arms, let me dream, too, that he is in mine.
Bea C. Pilotin is a Qatar-based Filipino writer and author of two books: 'In Love And In Heartbreak' and 'The Whys Of Us.' Her work has been published on Thought Catalog, Unwritten, The Mind's Journal, Medium, and more.