You can’t love someone into staying nor should you try to.

You deserve better than people who take you for granted and use your heart like a tissue to bandage their own. You deserve better than holding on to the hope that they’ll come back to you because really, life has a funny way of turning once upon a times with chapters of you and them into a million different sequels.

They were part of your storybook once but it doesn’t mean they were meant to stay.

It will hurt when the people you’ve known for years and have shared memories with — so many good ones hung upon the walls of your college dorm to remind you of home — leave like it’s all nothing. Go for days or weeks or sometimes even months without anything, just static.

You’ll feel all the hurt crawl itself up through your veins and leave homes in places that you thought were your own. You let them stay beneath your skin because they’ve become a part of who you are and without them, there will always be pieces missing.

So even when it hurts, you still have a part of you in them even when they’re not physically there.

That’s the thing about life, the beauty in the madness of sacrificing, trading in parts of yourself for the pieces of others and oddly, finding yourself a different kind of complete.

There will always be the “what if’s” and “what could’ve been’s”, haunting memories of 4 a.m. conversations about nothing and everything, pictures hung upon your walls like jigsaw puzzles of someone else’s memories (and, sometimes, that’s how it feels like glimpsing into your past and seeing someone with your facial features and your eyes but not being able to recognize them).

Life is all about hurt and heartbreak and being knocked off your feet over and over and over again. It will steal the air from your lungs and knock the wind right out of you.

Life will leave you if you let it. So, don’t let it. Learn how to stand back up again on your own. Love and let love hurt. Live with mistakes and don’t be afraid to make them. Live and learn and mess up and try and try and try again.

Love is not a losing game.

You will miss out on the people that stayed in your life and the people that will find their way home to you if you keep on reaching out for the ones who left.