Love — it’s the emotion that brings out our most vulnerable feelings and leaves us defenseless to hurt. To love another person, whether platonically or romantically, is to trust someone to support us when we’re weak. Yet most people, I believe, confuse love with putting their whole heart in someone else’s care. I’ll admit, I loved this romanticized version growing up, and I thought that’s what love meant: people giving 100% to each other no matter what. I thought love meant happiness and that you couldn’t be truly happy without it.

But the kind of love I believed in was the kind where I expected someone to drop anything and everything for me the second I needed them, that this person was my happiness. If there’s anything I regret growing up, it was I let this convoluted idea of affection control my life. My friend not answering her phone when I’m having a crisis did not mean the end of a friendship, nor did a bad conversation with a crush signal the end. The distorted image I had of love only led to heartbreak until I realized the biggest cliche of all — you can’t understand or love another person fully until you can do it for yourself. I had to learn to accept all of my physical features, personal philosophies, and idiosyncrasies as vital parts of who I was, and that my interpretation of a rejection doesn’t mean that was the intent.

This poem I wrote reflects the naive way of thinking I used to have. I often reread it to remind myself of the negatively I allowed to affect my life before I learned to see my own worth and value regardless of how others viewed me.

How It Felt To Lose You

She loved the beach.

Loved the way the ocean glimmered as the sun set
With thoughts of him illuminating the sky
Like stars leading to heaven;
Because that was what he was — a heavenly mixture of sideways smiles and late night chuckles only she could hear.

He was her muse,
Her silver lining in a tavern of darkness,
And she could have sworn the ocean lived in his eyes.
And his voice,
A sound as smooth as the current they drifted through, hands intertwined
Like the moon and the sun.

His skin was the very essence of the ocean floor, the scent of sandy hair on the boardwalk on Friday evenings
Her secrets filled the depths of his mind — tales only his ears will ever be graced with.
And his arms,
His arms were Neptune’s castle, so strong yet so gentle, the last tie to Earth she had.

Until he unleashed his wrath and decreed her a stranger,
demolishing their hideaway,
demolishing them,
And the sand turned red with blood flowing from his knives,
From his betrayals and his broken promises.

He slashed through every last brick and stone until nothing remained but the scars of her misery.

The sky held no light now;
The current once united against all odds split apart with one up to shore,
The other heading down, down, down
Until she was gone from his embrace,
Listless on the jagged floor.

Pain is only temporary, they said,
Yet she could still feel each caress of his hand,
Still feel every heartbeat through the vast sea.

But his castle was no longer her safe haven and the sand no longer smelled of him.

She hated the beach.