My long-distance goodbye.
To my first long-distance heartbreak, the first person I have tried falling asleep thinking about a future and shed tears until its weight became heavier than the ‘’what ifs’’ I created before going to bed. How much I wished you were just an illusion on my mind since I’ve never touched your skin.
What a different kind of pain! What a unique feeling that is to desire and long for you! Have you ever felt this way? Too submissive to someone that it feels like a heavyweight in your back, but at the same time, a lightness in your stomach? - you can even feel the butterflies flying freely in the space that is only fulfilled from them. Pure anxiety and craving for love.
I imagined scenarios - seeing you in Morocco, waiting for you in São Paulo, visiting Rio together and even leaving our countries together in a future goodbye. Little by little I realized my life had space for you and recognized that in this unilateral relationship I would never be in control, which you always were, and then, hating you for making me discover things I didn't know about myself became comforting.
You made me realize that I crave so much attention and that your company made me want to jump around my bedroom. I also discovered that being alone is not too comfortable as I thought it was: ‘’I’m better off alone’’ that I repeated continuously to myself suddenly became a wide-open lie.
I saw you in my dreams and futures (since I planned more than one), but the pain of my conscience from knowing that everything is distant - just like you are -, agonized me coldly. The literal distance between us both doesn’t hurt as much as the distance between our hearts: you don’t think about me the way I think about you. I know that my flaws made you want to get away from the mess I am - which you honestly aroused on me. However, it does hurt a lot to wish you knowing that you don’t wish for me.
I acted stupidly in the hope of you to notice me and see how I was not the teenager you’ve met anymore. I wanted you to see that I grew up, but at the same time, I wanted you to see that I continued being the bubbly girl you’ve once met. Such a beautiful confusion where I didn’t know what I wanted to be in your thoughts! But now I realize that I just wanted to be seen by you. I was searching for something I couldn’t reach.
I fell asleep by listening to your voice notes. In one of them, you taught me that people come and go and that I shouldn’t be like you: numb. I should feel the temporary pain and accept that people just come and go. I cried two times by listening to that specific audio: the first time I cried was because I figured out that you knew me too well when you said exactly what I needed to hear while in pain from my abandonment issues. And then, 2 months after you sent that voice note, I cried when I realized that I fell deeply for you and started to take those words you said about moving on to apply to my present - trying to let you go of my mind as you were the adviser to the pain I was feeling because of you.
The funny thing is, which I will never understand, how can someone fall for a person you’ve never seen in real life? You only touched me in my selfish dreams, I don’t even know how your scent is like or how your hands would intertwine on mine. Would you hold it tight? Or would you give me space at first - which I would quickly beg you to hold me as if I might burst like a last love kind of feeling?
It’s weird how my first desperate heartbreak was someone I could never actually meet. Little by little, you started to ghost me and I guess the thrill just expired on your side of the world.
Life goes on and I know that someday I will heal from this rollercoaster that was realizing one morning that you like someone that lives miles from you and is not on the same page. Agony turns to acceptance and then to healing.
Goodbye,
Estela.
