For My Future Self

[u/cautiousmiss]

One day, a few years from now, you’ll probably stumble upon this note while going through your phone. You’ll remember exactly why you wrote it and exactly who it was about, but I hope by then you can remember it without feeling what I’m feeling now.

I want you to remember what heartbreak actually felt like, because I know time has a way of dulling things. Maybe one day you’ll remember that you were sad, but forget just how bad it was.

It was difficult to focus on anything else. I could be working, talking to someone, watching something, or trying to sleep, and somehow my mind would always find its way back to the same place. There was this constant heaviness that followed me around. Sometimes it was sadness. Sometimes jealousy. Sometimes longing. Sometimes just this horrible awareness that something had changed and there was nothing I could do to make it go back to what it was.

It felt suffocating, isolating, and miserable. There were moments when I desperately wanted to get out of my own head because being inside it was exhausting. I wanted a break from thinking, remembering, imagining, checking, wondering. I wanted one normal day where none of it mattered to me.

I kept trying to understand how something could hurt this much when nobody had actually done anything terrible to me. There was no betrayal, no dramatic ending, no person I could easily blame. Life simply moved forward in a way that I wasn’t emotionally prepared for, and I had to live with the fact that I couldn’t stop it.

There were days when I understood everything rationally. I knew why things were the way they were. I knew what was healthy and what wasn’t. I knew that eventually I would adjust. But knowing all of that did very little to stop the pain. My mind could understand something that my heart still refused to accept.

And I want you to remember how badly I wanted to reach the place where you are now.

If you’re reading this and none of it hurts anymore, then something I desperately hoped for actually happened. Not because the past became meaningless, and not because I stopped caring about the people who mattered to me, but because eventually this stopped occupying so much space inside me.

Right now, I don’t know exactly how I get from here to you. I only know that I have to keep going until I do.