I rested my chin on his chest and watched his eyelids flutter as he tried not to smile. "Go to sleep," he snapped. I giggled and buried my face into his right shoulder. Silence followed, only to be broken by another giggle. He opened one eye and smiled. "What?" "Oh, nothing." The silence lasted half a lifetime. The mood suddenly shifted, and I no longer wanted to giggle. "Want to know what's weird?" He let out an exaggerated groan. "Go to sleep." "I can hear your heartbeat." He opened his eyes and looked down at me. "Is it beating fast?" I pressed my cheek against the warmth of his shirt. "No, I think you're good." But in truth, his heart was pounding.

"A horrible end is better than endless horror." -Oliver Markus

You know that feeling you get which only exists when you come across someone whom you had long forgotten about? It's almost like a scar - a wound that was once so painful however it's been healing on your skin forever, you forgot about its presence.  You touch it again, vaguely remembering the wound it once was and how much it hurt, but now it does not cause too much discomfort anymore. You are my scar, you've become a part of me. 

A deep-rooted societal problem is that humans are predisposed to keep trying. We're not allowed to give up. We're not supposed to admit defeat. It is ingrained in us from birth to never give up, and to always try again, and again. We have to hold on as it makes us feel strong, we cannot let good things go, we can't stop, it's what we know and it's comfortable. But why should we live like this? We can't go through life living in our comfort zones, there is so much out there to love. Why should we hold on to someone/something till we're feeling defeated, weak and slumped over? If we're living in a state of defeat, are we really living anymore? 

I used to feel and think this way. I used to think that it meant I was weak if I didn't hold on, and if I let someone go I was just giving up. However, most of the time, the best and strongest thing for us is to be set free. From letting go of a piece of clothing you know you'll never wear again, to letting go of that person that we once loved but won't get to love again; at least not at this moment. It's an incredibly valuable thing to learn in life because it teaches us how to keep ourselves happy and value our own well-being over not being alone. We should be with people who we enjoy being around, who make us feel good and happy and loved. We are all valuable and deserve to be valued, and we shouldn't hang onto those who are not worthy of us. 

It's not easy to let go though. It's not so simple to let all of that pain just disappear. Because if we want to remove the pain and person that has occupied our hearts for so long, we have to let everything go. We can't choose the memories we want to isolate for our own nostalgia. They exist within us as stories with beginning and endings, and we are not able to pick and choose what memories we want to keep as one memory will always bleed into another, which leads to the memory of their eventual departure in our lives. We have to stop thinking about them, stop obsessing over the things that maybe we could've done differently to make them stay. We have to let go of everything they meant to us. We have to prove to ourselves that our lives can be just as beautiful and worth living without them in it. It feels very much like death, when you finally realise that you no longer care about someone (and vice versa) and how they're living life has no more affect on you. For your own sake, the person they were when they were with you is no longer preserved in your memory. 

Now I regard letting go as a kind of victory - regardless of the reason. Letting go is something that we need to learn to do in order to move forward in life, its a necessary act of self-preservation. Letting go is like stepping out of a fog that once surrounded you and prevented you from seeing the sun. Eventually, you will wake up one day and realise that you are in fact okay. After being drowned in your own oppressive silence, slowly but surely you will simply start to forget. The acute feeling of pain of losing someone will lessen with each passing day, and finally there will come a day when you don't care and better yet, you won't notice it, because you will have other things to think about. How can we expect ourselves to open up to new experiences and new people if we're so stuck on the past? 

I haven't spoken to you in awhile, and as we exchanged words it felt different from before, and it was slightly unsettling. It felt as if it was some form of unspoken confirmation that things between us have changed, that I've let you go and you've let me go. It felt like it was out of necessity, with both of us knowing clearly that holding onto each other would not make what we had come back to us, despite our deepest compulsions and instincts telling us each time we meet we're meant to be. The part of ourselves we needed to erase to move on were just going to have to be forgotten. You told me you never forgotten about me, and I agreed because you never really forget about anyone, you just release them. And we released each other. We stopped allowing what I do and what you do to have any meaning to each other. I've let you move on, and I've let you fall in love again. I know when I see you when I'm back, I won't be sad because the person I once knew exists somewhere within you, but I'm separated by too much time to try to reach him again. 

As much as I've missed you, I'm learning to move on and I've let you go. I've learned to love myself and I've definitely learned to put my own feelings as priority. I know that I have to be happy first before others can give me happiness. I still miss you and I'm ever so thankful that you're a part of my life, a part of me. 

For as long as I can remember, I've always been that girl who opens up her heart willingly and widely, thinking that no one was undeserving of my love. But just like everyone else, I went through my moments of hurt when I thought my heart was beyond repair, and perhaps I was incapable of loving again.

Then I met you.

I met you and my heart opened up because you made me feel safe. You've become my safe, firm piece of ground that I run to when the ground is opening up. You've become the most beautiful thing in my world. You've become my definition of perfect.

Everything you do is perfect. From the way your lips purse up when you blow out smoke rings with your cigarette, to the way you fix your hair over and over (even though it looks the same most of the time). From the way you have that little distinctive sway when you walk, to the way you talk about that game I hate so much with this childish innocent gleam in your eyes. The way you subtly adjust the way you're sitting so it's more comfortable for me to rest my head on your shoulder. It's the little things that I've started to take notice of, because it's the little things I'm gonna miss the most when I'm gone.

I feel like I love you too much, if that is even possible. I feel it when I look at you when you're not looking at me, how I study your face - your eyes, your nose, your smile. I feel it when I wake up next to the warmth of your body and suddenly the day seems better already. I feel it whenever I smile to myself simply because I'm thinking of you. So because I love you too much, I apologise and please forgive me if I say "I love you" too much. In life we are not infinite on time or immortal on second chances. You know I love you but I don't want to leave it to the unsaid to imply it. I will tell you "I love you" because that's what I want you to remember, even if you forget everything else.

And I know you love me back. It shows in the little things that you do. Just like how you let me decide what we should eat 90% of the time. It's how you hold me and kiss my head when I'm having a bad day, even when I unfairly took out my frustrations on you. How you get angry with me when I clam up and shut you out, and how you fight back when our relationship gets called into question.

You taught me that love shouldn't be treated as currency, calculated with every exchange. But it should be given freely to those who can accept it, respect it, and treat it with care. You've shown me what it really means to love someone. Love means letting yourself go. Love means giving in. Love means taking chances. Our love may fade, but it will never give up.

I felt like I didn't deserve your love because "we accept the love we think we deserve", but you accepted me for me in the strongest way possible. You're my missing puzzle piece and you complete me, and you make me a better version of myself. Being with you has made me realise that being a good person isn't a prerequisite for someone's love, because if it was, you wouldn't love me.

Never would I have expected us to be driving towards each other along the same road. And when we crashed, I totalled my heart and our life together.

Your love has changed me forever.

"These are not
battle scars.
These are not
proof of my survival.
My riddled body is
not
so poetic.
The fact that they
exist
proves I was
very sad and very sick.
The fact that they
are scar tissued
proves I am
progressing.
This was never supposed to be
poetry.
There is
no
romance
in pain."

- Michelle K., Truth About Scars 

"Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn."

-Sylvia Plath

Is any of this worth it?

"I know what it's like to want to die, how it hurts to smile, how you try to fit in but you can't, how you hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside." 

To everybody out there that is having a bad day, just know that you're not alone and that the world is so much bigger. Smile and look past everything that seems to be going wrong in your life, and you'll realize that life really is very beautiful.

xx.

Insomnia is a kind of torture. Because while the world is fast asleep, you're up all alone, your mind buzzing with every random thought in the universe, and sometimes the thoughts will reach a standstill and your mind goes blank. You become more aware of the silence, and it is during this moment that you realise how alone you are.

"You see that girl? Yeah, her. She seems so invincible right? But just touch her and she'll wince. She has secrets and trusts no-one. She's the perfect example of betrayal, because everyone that she ever trusted, broke her."