love makes up for a lot

I loved my first love with everything in me before they blocked me without warning one day. After 2 weeks of numbness, where I pretended we were still together the whole time, winter break came, and I shut off my phone without telling anyone and went to another country where I introduced myself with a different name because I thought that pretending to be someone else would make me forget how empty I felt. I became skin and bones because I couldn't eat and spent almost all my time writing about them. It got to the point where I searched for anywhere online I could anonymously dump all the poetry and essays and art I made for them, just to feel like it went somewhere other than my computer screen. On New Year's Eve I snuck out of my hotel during the fireworks and wrote their name in the sand of the beach to watch it wash away for hours. I only watched movies and read books and listened to songs I remembered they loved, even going so far as to mimic some of their routine because I thought that if I could somehow recreate their milieu, I would understand what exactly they were thinking when they decided I wasn't enough for them. The love and admiration I carried for them so deep inside me turned to grief that I drowned in. 

After returning from my travel, my friends, in their efforts to get me over it, tried to force me to speak to other people, but their name was only and always repeating in my head, and I just felt sick, like I was betraying the truth of who I was and what I wanted. It took me longer than we dated to get their name out of my head. It took me even longer than that to convince myself that my future had meaning without them.

What took me the longest was realizing that what made them special was my love. And without my love, their actions didn't seem so soft, their words didn't carry the same warmth, and everything about them that I once romanticized to the point of near obsession didn't seem irreplaceable. I realized that what we had was special because I made it so. I wasn't in love with them; I was in love with what my love made of them, and my love made up for a lot. I started to uncover the aggression, abuse, and distance they held against me, all of which I plastered love over until concealed. They weren't my soulmate—we actually had very conflicting personalities. I also finally figured out I was the other woman the whole time (they had a whole other gf!!). I promised myself that I will never be so consumed by a person again that I have to deceive myself with a reflection of my love to cover up their absence of it. I want true love, and how will love be true if I'm in love with my idea of a person, not who they actually are? 

It's been a while, and I am now with a very wonderful person. I don't compare them to my first love because it's just completely different, but it's safe to say that what I have now is way more pure and true than what I was experiencing before. I can be fully myself now. If I had to go through whatever that was to get to this, I don't regret it. As much as I've "moved on" though, I hate calling it that because I think it's an unfair way to put it. I lost the girl I used to be the day I lost my first love, and that version of me will miss them forever. I think that is just how it is with losing anything you put yourself into.

I also want to say that if you have experienced what I did, if you let your love turn a bad person into a seemingly really good one, you were never in love with them; you were in love with your love, so why hurt yourself seeking love before appreciating your own?