(Maybe) love and (having a hard time) forgetting

The weird thing about it is I’m not sure I ever loved you in the first place. I mean, yeah, I said it, but even I had trouble believing it was true. I’m not sure if you had the same suspicions.

I wondered if it was the autonomy bred into girls like me, taught not to be enamored with boys but with books. Maybe I am just one of thousands of would-be romantic young women whose hearts are fluttering around not like butterflies but fading embers, convincing themselves that this feeling couldn’t possibly be the thing that the movies say it is.

But the hurt made me wonder if it had been real. I told myself that pain is not the same thing as love, even when it lasted for years, but that’s all natural selection too. Who here would do anything for someone who has hurt them? If you are raising your hand, you are human. And we are a dying breed.

And this is the thing I always worried about. I loved you (maybe) not because you loved me back but because I admired you. I knew it wouldn’t last forever but I told myself that if the movies were right then I had made in investment in someone spectacular. Emotions are more important to economics most men would like to admit.

And once I noticed, I couldn’t stop starting at the pictures of you doing the things you loved. The things I loved watching you do. You had become everything that I knew you would be. I wonder if you knew you would too. I wonder if you knew that I was (maybe) never really in love with you?