Letter 006

I Thought Missing You Meant I Loved You.

The relief when you came back.

The relief when your name appeared on my phone.

The relief when, after hours or days of wondering whether I mattered to you, you suddenly made me feel like I did.

I called that feeling love.

I know better now.

Because loving you often felt less like being loved and more like waiting to find out if I still was.

I waited for replies.

For plans to become real.

For your mood to change.

For whatever distance had appeared between us to disappear again.

And when it did, the relief was enormous.

That should have told me something.

Instead, I thought the intensity meant we had something special.

I thought the ache proved the depth of my feelings.

I thought the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about you meant you must have meant everything to me.

But of course I couldn’t stop thinking about you.

I never knew where I stood.

There is nothing peaceful about trying to solve a person.

So I studied everything.

And then you would come back.

You would be warm.

You would want me.

You would make me feel ridiculous for ever wondering.

And my whole body would relax.

That feeling was powerful.

Powerful enough that I mistook it for love.

Sometimes I was missing the moment you made the hurting stop.

There is a difference.

I can see it now because the love I want no longer requires me to suffer first in order to feel relieved by it.

I don’t want affection that feels extraordinary because I spent three days wondering whether it was gone.

I don’t want to confuse being chosen again with being chosen.

I don’t want someone’s return to feel like proof of devotion when their leaving is what created the desperation in the first place.

And I don’t want to spend my life translating inconsistency into romance because consistency once felt unfamiliar to me.

I loved you.

I can say that without turning everything we had into something it wasn’t.

Some of it was real.

Some of it was beautiful.

Some of it hurt me.

All of those things can be true at once.

But missing someone does not automatically mean they belong in your life.

Wanting someone back does not mean going back would be good for you.

And feeling an enormous rush when someone returns does not necessarily mean you have found your person.

Sometimes it means you have finally been given relief from the uncertainty they created.

I wish I had known that sooner.

I would have spent less time measuring love by how desperately I wanted it back.

I would have noticed how rarely I felt safe while I had it.

That is the part I understand now.

I thought missing you meant I loved you.

Sometimes it did.

And sometimes I just wanted the hurting to stop.