“Sometimes we fall in love with ideas, not people.” I remember you telling me this on the night I ran away. I ran to you, you who loved me like nobody else did. Not even my own family.

“What are you saying?” I’d asked, confused and weary from traveling all that way in the rain, with nothing but the clothes on my back.

“I mean you may have fallen in love with the idea of a happy family, and kept hoping that things would change when in reality they never would.”

You were a good therapist for me. I trusted you unlike I had trusted anyone else before, because even if you didn’t fully understand, you tried to. That was the most anyone had ever given me. You made me feel seen, but I had to learn the hard way that trust only goes so far.

“I fell in love with the idea of loving you,” you told me a while after the 4 years of our so-called ‘loving each other’ ended. “But I don’t think I was really in love with you.” Did you know it was those ten words that broke my heart beyond repair? Even if I didn’t fully think you believed them, hearing your voice and seeing your mouth from those words shattered me.

Thanks for nothing, I guess.