by JCV
I regret meeting you.
I regret loving you.
I regret losing myself.
I regret all the nights I waited for you.
I regret every time I lied to myself.
Every time something inside me screamed leave and I stayed.
I regret how small my world became.
But the thing I regret the most?
How much I miss you.
Your messages.
Your silences.
Your moods.
Your absence.
Especially your absence.
You are not here and still manage to occupy every fucking corner of the room.
And the worst part?
I let you do it.
For a long time, I blamed you for what happened.
It was easier that way.
But there’s another truth I don’t like nearly as much.
I stayed.
Nobody chained me.
I saw the cracks.
I saw what loving you was doing to me.
And I stayed.
No matter how hard I tried to walk away, I always stayed.
I forgot the fights.
The silence.
The anger.
Myself.
Just to love you again.
And again.
It wasn’t about what we were.
It was about what we could have been.
Somehow, that was harder to let go of.
Until I found myself staring at the ceiling at night, wondering how something that once felt so beautiful had become so fucking painful.
I kept trying to save us.
I nearly destroyed myself doing it.
By the end, I didn’t recognize the person looking back at me.
I had become suspicious. Angry. Needy. Exhausted.
I measured love in replies.
I measured hope in good days.
I measured my worth by how much of you I could still keep.
And the worst part?
I called that love.
Maybe it was.
Maybe that’s what frightens me most.
Because not every love saves you.
Some love consumes you.
That’s what loving you felt like.
And when I finally lost you, I thought the pain would kill me.
It didn’t.
It did something worse.
It stayed.
Quietly.
In songs I stopped listening to.
In places I stopped visiting.
In stupid little things nobody else would understand.
For a while, I couldn’t even remember who I had been before you.
But eventually I did.
Piece by piece.
I found myself again.
I regret meeting you.
I regret loving you.
I regret losing myself in you.
I regret how much it cost me to become myself again.
But if you were standing in front of me tonight, exactly as you were the first time…
If I knew everything that was coming—
every fight, every tear, every goodbye, every night I’d spend trying to forget you—
I’d like to believe I’d turn around.
I’d like to believe I’d save myself.
But I know me.
And I know you.
I’d walk straight toward you.
Again.
And again.
And again.
My favorite regret.
Photo by Pauline Iakovleva on Unsplash
