I hope you’re happy now. And this time, when I say those words I mean them. They are no longer tainted with bitterness or sarcasm as they used to be when I would spit them out of my mouth. I used to hope that you weren’t happy. In fact, I prayed that you weren’t. I spent so much of my time wishing that you were miserable. That you were kept up late at night filled with regret for how you ended things and wishing you could take back all those things you said to me as you were telling me goodbye. I wished and prayed that you would call me and tell me it was all a mistake, a misjudgment. I hoped that you were as miserable as I was those first few weeks without you, when it was all I could do to fill the hole that you left in my life, your absence being the most obvious thing in every room to me. I wanted you to feel the same sense of loss I felt, instead of filling it with someone new, someone I didn’t and would never know more than just a smiling face in new pictures next to you that replaced our old ones. I hoped you were the opposite of happy because that’s how I felt.

I hope you’re happy now, because I’m happy now. As the weeks turned into months without you, I found out that I could be happy without you. I found out, much to my own surprised, that I was unhappy with you, I just didn’t know it. And that usually when a relationship ends, both parties are equally as miserable, just one person seems to know it first. I realized that I could be happy without you as soon as I stopped defining you as my happiness and found it within myself. As I started on my own journey to find happiness again, I secretly hoped you were watching. I grew out my hair, lost all of my weight, let go of so many of my fears, and after a while I stopped hoping you were watching me being happy without you. Because I already was. I didn’t need you to make me happy. Even though you did just that for two years, I realized that I never needed you to but I allowed you to because then it meant not doing the work to make myself happy on my own.

Today I am happy. I am happy even when I am profoundly sad. I can find happiness in every day because I’ve spent enough time with myself to know how to find my own happiness. I hope you’re happy now because I’ve let go of you. You are no longer tied to my happiness in any way, and because of that I can forgive you. I used to think it was funny when people would say that I’d thank you for leaving me. But today I am thankful that you loved me. And I am thankful that you left me. I know how to be happy with a relationship and how to be just as happy without one, and I would have never learned that without you. Today I am thankful that you set me free to find a person who makes me undeniably happy. I am happy that I can recognize pure bliss in another person, and that I can finally say I understand without a doubt why everything happens for a reason. And as I start something new, and trust in the magic of new beginnings, I will take a second to thank you. So thank you, I’m so happy now. And I hope you are too.