“Everyone always wants to know how you can tell when it’s true love, and the answer is this: when the pain doesn’t fade and the scars don’t heal, and it’s too damned late.”
― Jonathan Tropper
At first, your mind will work in overtime just trying to forget the mere memory of that person’s existence. To mask the feelings of sadness or the constant worry that you’ll have trouble latching onto pure happiness again without them. And at first this approach will work. But then, all of a sudden, the thought of them will come back to haunt you. You’ll be riding the subway to work and you’ll see their name on signs everywhere. “___’s Dry Cleaners” or “___’s Pizza Shop” [Note to self: date someone in the future with an unusual name]. Or you’ll be blasting Spotify while getting ready for a girl’s night out and their favorite song will come on and pulse through you as if your heartbeat is now suddenly controlled by the rhythm and the lyrics of a melody that once belonged to both of you.
You’ll start to miss them like you miss that shirt you really want to wear but can’t seem to find anywhere. You’ll tear apart your room, your life, looking for it. Confused as to where it could possibly be. I swear I last put it here. I could have sworn I just saw it yesterday. But it’s gone now and by the time you find it, by the time it enters your life again, it’ll be all wrinkly and doused in lint. You’ll have grown out of it by then—that’s for sure.
You can miss that person so badly it hurts. In the same way your body is overcome with an unshakeable soreness after you lift weights a few pounds too heavy at the gym. Nothing you do feels okay—you can barely eat, sleep, smile without feeling a flash of pain that resonates deep down to your gut.
You can miss the way their voice would fizzle like a firecracker as they whispered goodnight halfway across the country over the phone.
Or the way they’d Gchat you at exactly 9:38 in the morning.
Or how they used to write you love poems using jumbled lines from Jay-Z lyrics.
You even miss the things you swore you never would. Like their terrible taste in Western movies. Or how frustrated you’d get at them when they’d pick a fight with you because they just didn’t know how else to tell you the truth: that they missed you terribly so.
You’ll miss how well you knew them. How you could predict the exact defense they’d spit out half way through a heated argument. How many sugars they liked in their coffee and shakes of salt on their fries. How their eyes would bulge like mini hot air balloons when they were trying to tell you a lie.
You can miss the things about them that once drove you absolutely bonkers. The way they’d add “s” onto words like toward or backward and how you felt like their 4th grade English teacher always correcting them in public. Or how after you’d write them a text message saying how happy they made you, and they’d write back only one word. Back then it drove you so absolutely crazy that you once tossed your phone across the room into a pile of perfectly stacked books. But now, well, now you’d do just about anything to see their name pop up on your phone. To get that one word thanks or okay text message from them and actually feel something, anything, again.
You can miss the way they’d finger the tomatoes off their salad and onto the bread plate at overpriced restaurants. How you’d launch into a debate over whether its toe-may-toe or toe-mah-toe until you both laughed so hard people at surrounding tables, lit up by romantic candlelight and expensive bottles of wine, would stare at you like you didn’t belong, here, together.
And, you can miss someone more than you ever really loved them.
This I know to be absolutely true.
