I think that when I’m 45, you’ll be the story I tell my daughter. That’s what terrifies me the most. When she’s crying in bed about a boy whose goodbye shatters her bones, and she showers to try and scrub him off her skin.

I’ll tell her it’ll be okay and she’ll tell me I don’t understand. She’ll tell me, “You just don’t get it.” So I’ll crawl into bed with her and tell her that story. The story of the boy I met when I was seventeen, working as a cashier at Walgreens. The boy who saved me, only to kill me. The boy who set my world on fire.

I'll tel her how I enjoyed losing sleep and trying so hard not to laugh too loud so my mother wouldn’t hear through my bedroom walls.

And I’ll tell her about how much it hurt. How it hurt so much that I was the one crying on my mother’s floor as I stained her favorite sheets. How it hurt so much I would have to pull over on the side of the road just to scream and cry because I could never let my family see me like that. Because crying was weakness in their eyes.

Because I was supposed to be the strong one, right? I was supposed to be the one who keeps it together, right?

I'll tell her that loving someone can change you; because no one ever told me. The one you can never shake off.

I could never be who I am if it wasn’t for loving him; and then leaving him.

I’ll tell her its okay to cry.

It's okay to not be okay.

And then I’ll tell her how eventually it stopped hurting. How it got better. How I eventually went back to work.

10 years from now I'll probably wonder what he did with his life. If he ever saw his mother again, or if he ever moved to California like he said he would. And 10 years from now maybe I’ll marry someone and recite our vows in front of everyone we know. Ill say that he is the love of my life under the lords name, while my mother and I being the only two people who know that I’ve already had the love of my life; but I couldn’t save him, so I decided to save me instead.

"I started to see myself clear, the same way I learned to see you clear through your actions. That's when my hate turned to empathy and I did the inevitable...I prayed for you. The moment I allowed myself to speak blessings unto your life, that was the moment I felt my heart had begun to heal."
-Mirtha Michelle Castro Marmol., Letters To The Men I Have Loved