I'll hate you if I can; if not, I'll love you reluctantly.

This is my first blog entry and it couldn't be more depressing, lol. I was thinking about something recently. This is a feeling that I've kept hidden in my heart for so long and I think now it's the best time to let it out, at 2am on a random Wednesday, while I'm in bed. Loving someone after they ended things with you or vice versa. Is it possible? Of course it is. But how? Why does it happen?

The first feeling after someone breaks up with you.

I think I've never felt such a complicated feeling. The first feeling that I always feel after someone breaks up with me, is grief. Leaving someone sometimes is like telling them "I have loved you and cared for you and you were an important part of my life, but I have to go now." It's like they're dying but it's not really the death of someone that you're grieving. No one is dead so why do you feel like this? You feel grief because even though no one died, you still lost something. You lost the relationship you built with that special someone. You think to yourself that it's never coming back. It doesn't matter if it does, in that moment you feel your whole world shatter around you. It's the end, you tell yourself, I'm never gonna experience this, with this specific person, again. 

Leaving pieces of you behind.

Whenever you lose that special someone, you lose some of yourself too. You lose the music you shared with them and that you will never listen to the same after this. You lose every place that was ever important to you because that special someone was there with you. You lose a piece of that love you gave to that person. They took it and brought it who-knows-where, but you know you'll never have it back. The different kinds of loss are so vast and different that you don't even know where to start from to unpack them all.

I'll hate you if I can; if not, I'll love you reluctantly.

"Odero, si potero; si non, invitus amabo." Ovidius wrote Amores between 23 b.c. and 14 b.c. but the feelings that resonate in this quote are as contemporary as ever. I was thinking about a little fling I had with a guy. It was supposed to be that, just a fling, something temporary because I wasn't interested in something more. Turns out I was very easy to manipulate at the time, unsure of my feelings and unsure of my direction in life. He probably saw right through me, and he grabbed his chance. He used me like a marionnette, just a toy for him to play with. I wasn't concerned in the beginning, I wasn't that invested emotionally anyway. But then I started to know him a bit deeper and he became someone in my eyes. He wasn't a body anymore. He was someone with a soul, a story, something to tell the world and his own, individual experiences. He wasn't perfect, absolutely he wasn't. He treated me pretty badly throughout our entire "dating" period, let's call it that. But I was finding excuses for his behaviour because I started to understand his thought process a little bit more. He told me all about his past and I got invested. I was trying to change him for the better, but that is a common mistake a lot of people have to commit at least once in their lifetime, isn't it?

After things ended with him, I started hating him. That's not true though, I've never hated him. I told everyone who asked how I was feeling that I hated him and I never wanted to see him again after what he did. But I never actually hated him. I still love him, but not the way a lover could. I never loved him like that. I love him as an individual who is making so many mistakes, using girl after girl just for the fun of it, but who has a deep void inside him. I root for him, I hope for a change of heart, a redemption. In the future I'd like to hear that he got married and he became a better man. But I don't want to see him again. I will try to hate him if I can, but for now I just love him reluctantly.

Moving on.

How does someone move on? I've asked that question to myself many times. I don't think someone ever moves on completely. We just learn how to live with the grief and eventually it will get so small that we don't notice it anymore. That it doesn't have power in our life anymore. That it can't control how we feel anymore. I think I kinda got to that point. Whenever I see him I still feel my guts twisting in a feeling that I can only call grief. But that's because grief never actually leaves, it just becomes dormant for as long as we don't wake him up. I am so much better right now, I've started to discover more and more about myself, my passions and my hobbies. Grief has become so small now, it doesn't play around my room anymore, it just stays in bed most of the time, along with the other small pieces of grief that I felt in my life. I'm concentrating on myself and that is what you're supposed to do too. 

Moving on after a relationship has ended sounds like the most impossible thing in the beginning. But I assure you, it just takes time. A lot of it. More than you can think of. So don't get surprised if you're still thinking about a three months relationship after a year that it's ended. You're not weak for that, you're just healing and it takes time. You need to do things that fulfill your desires, your dreams and your passions. And eventually you'll stop noticing every detail that reminds you of them. You'll start living for yourself again, and you'll grow and improve yourself for the next person that's coming into your life. You got this, we got this. <3