when someone rewrites you into the villain

there are heartbreaks you survive, and there are heartbreaks you inhabit. the latter are the ones that take up residence beneath your ribs, the ones you carry like a second pulse, the ones that don’t ask permission before they ache. this is one of those heartbreaks — the kind that follows me from morning quiet to midnight stillness, the kind that pulls at the edges of my thoughts even when i’m doing everything in my power to pretend i’ve healed.

i’ve been living inside an ache no one can see.
an ache that started with words i never expected from a mouth i once trusted.
an ache that hasn’t loosened its grip, no matter how many days pass.

he said things that carved through me — sharp things, unexpected things, unforgiving things. things that landed inside me and stayed, ringing like bells i never wanted to hear. i keep replaying them, not because i believe them, but because the person who spoke them mattered too much. because his voice had been a place of softness once, and hearing it turn hard felt like betrayal in its purest form.

but this is the part i keep returning to, the truth that refuses to hide in the shadows:

i loved him.
i still do.
and god, how i ache for him.

it’s a love that didn’t end when the story cracked.
it didn’t wither when he rewrote the narrative.
it didn’t fade when he painted me as the villain in a way that felt calculated, convenient, cruel.

he needed somewhere to place his hurt, and i became the easiest target. the woman with the open heart. the woman who sees the best in people even when they hand her their worst. the woman who loves without armor and hopes that softness will be enough.

he turned me into a shadow of myself — not because it was true, but because it was simpler for him to carry anger than to carry the truth of what we were.

and yet… even now… i still feel him like a haunting.

i feel him in the songs that hit too deep.
i feel him in the cold air that catches in my lungs.
i feel him when the night wraps around me and the silence gets too heavy to ignore.

i feel him in the way my chest tightens without warning, the way my breath stalls, the way a single memory can knock me sideways. i feel him in the places i didn’t even know were capable of longing.

i am still in love with him — not the version that hurt me, but the version that held me gently once, the version that understood the cadence of my soul, the version i trusted more than i should have. i miss him in ways that feel impossible to articulate, impossible to reason with, impossible to outgrow.

and the ache doesn’t just come from losing him — it comes from knowing he walked away believing a version of me that wasn’t real. believing a story he rewrote in a moment of hurt. believing i was someone to be blamed instead of someone to be loved through the chaos.

if he only knew how deeply i chose him.
if he only knew how soft he made me, how open, how undone.
if he only knew how much of me was still tethered to him long after his words tried to sever the connection.

i don’t think he realized what he meant to me.
i don’t think he realized the space he occupied.
i don’t think he realized the depth of the love he was walking away from.

this morning, my friend felt the heaviness in me before i even said a word. they reached out because they sensed the ache i couldn’t hide anymore — the sadness sitting under my skin, the grief curling around my breath, the longing i’ve been trying to swallow. they wrote to me because they knew i needed something soft to counterbalance the sharpness he left behind. they reminded me who i am beneath the bruising. they reminded me i’m not the creature he made me out to be in his anger.

their words felt like a hand on my spine, steadying me.
their love felt like something holy.
their timing felt like rescue.

and yet — even wrapped in her tenderness — i felt that pull toward him. that familiar gravity. that quiet, devastating truth that i haven’t been able to untangle myself from.

i still love him.
deeply.
dangerously.
quietly.
loudly.
always.

i don’t know if he’ll ever understand how real it was for me.
how real it still is.

he’ll never know how many nights i’ve stayed awake replaying the good moments — the softness, the laughter, the connection that felt almost fate-touched. he’ll never know how many times i’ve reached for my phone just to feel a flicker of the closeness we once had. he’ll never know how deeply i believed in the possibility of us, even in the mess, even in the uncertainty.

and he’ll never know how loudly i hurt when the ending crashed down.

but maybe this is what love looks like sometimes — unreturned, unresolved, unfinished. maybe this is the story of a heart that cracked but refused to close. maybe this is the truth i’m meant to sit with until time decides i’ve learned whatever lesson grief needed to teach me.

still…
if he ever reads this —
if he ever stumbles across these words,
if some instinct in him stops long enough to feel the weight between the lines —

i hope he knows this:

it was him.
it’s still him.
and i’m trying to breathe around the ache of that truth.

with ink + bloom, 🌻