I’ll Never Love Again: The Goodbye That Took My Heart With It

I still remember the way you looked at me the night you left — like you knew something I didn’t. Like you were memorizing me for the last time, quietly archiving the curve of my cheek, the way my hands trembled when I was trying to be brave. You didn’t say much. Neither did I. Some goodbyes are too heavy for words.

If I had known it would be the last time I saw you… really saw you… I would’ve held your hand longer. I would’ve pressed my head into your chest and begged time to stop. I would’ve said what I never found the courage to say.

I love you.

I need you.

Please don’t go.

But I didn’t.

Because sometimes, love makes you selfish. And sometimes, it makes you silent.

You were always the kind of person who made everyone else feel like the center of the universe. Even when your world was crumbling. I saw it in your smile that last week — the one that didn’t quite reach your eyes. I saw it in the way you touched my back like you were reassuring yourself, not me. Like you knew this was goodbye, and you were trying to give me a soft landing.

I was too proud to ask you to stay, too scared to believe you might leave. Too in love with you to imagine life without you.

I’ve tried to move on. God knows I’ve tried.

I’ve gone on dates. I’ve sat across from strangers who smiled too much and asked too little. I’ve worn dresses I bought just to feel something again. I’ve pretended. I’ve laughed too loudly at jokes that didn’t land. I’ve kissed lips that weren’t yours and apologized to my heart for every second of it.

But no one feels like home.

No one is you.

The world has kept spinning since you left. That’s the most unfair part. The sun still rises. Coffee still brews. The mail still comes. But I don’t rise. I don’t brew. I don’t come back to life. I stay exactly where I was the day you disappeared — half-alive, half-haunted.

Every time someone says, “You’ll find love again,” I want to scream.

They don’t get it.

This wasn’t just love.

You weren’t just a person.

You were my safe place. My reason. My softness in a world that is so cruel and sharp.

People think heartbreak is about sadness, but it’s not. It’s about absence. It’s about waking up and realizing the one person who made the world bearable is no longer here to share it with you. It’s about reaching for someone who isn't coming back.

I haven’t opened the blinds in my room in over a year. The sunlight doesn’t feel warm anymore. It feels like an insult — a light too bright for a heart this dim.

I’m not bitter. I’m not angry.

Just empty.

I walk through the days like a ghost still tethered to a memory.

If I could rewind time, I’d say it all. Every word I swallowed. Every feeling I buried beneath my pride.

I'd cry until you saw just how much you meant to me.

I'd break my heart in two if it meant saving a part of you.

But I didn’t.

And now I live with that silence every single day.

I didn’t go to your funeral.

I couldn’t.

Not because I didn’t want to say goodbye, but because I never really said hello to the part of you that was slipping away.

I kept thinking, If I don’t see the ending, maybe it never really happened.

But it did.

And you’re really gone.

People ask if it was sudden. It’s easier to say yes. It keeps the conversation short. But the truth is, your soul had been packing its bags long before your body caught up. I saw it in the late-night stares into nothing. I heard it in the silence between our words. I felt it in the way your arms stopped feeling like anchors and started feeling like clouds — fading, floating, barely there.

I still keep your toothbrush in the bathroom. Still sleep on one side of the bed. Still pretend you might come back and need space.

Grief is a strange roommate — it doesn’t knock, doesn’t ask permission. It shows up, unpacked, loud and clumsy. It drinks your coffee and leaves your soul aching. Some days, I hate it. Other days, it’s the only thing that makes me feel close to you.

I thought time would help.

It didn’t.

Time just taught me how to look normal. How to smile on cue. How to talk about the weather while a storm rages inside. How to say “I’m fine” with the kind of practiced precision only heartbreak can craft.

But I’m not fine.

And maybe I never will be.

I’ve made peace with the fact that I may never love again.

Not because I’m bitter. Not because I’m closed off.

But because I gave the best parts of me to you.

And I’d rather keep living with your ghost than try to make a home in someone else’s shadow.

They say love is supposed to heal.

But sometimes, the love that changes you is also the love that ruins you for everyone else.

Still, I wouldn’t change a thing.

If loving you meant this pain — this haunting — this endless echo of what could have been…

Then so be it.

I’ll carry it.

Because even in your absence, you taught me what it means to love deeply. To lose completely. To survive anyway.

There’s an old journal in my drawer — one you gave me before we were “us.” You scribbled a note inside that reads:

“One day, when I’m not around, read this and remember: you were the best thing that ever happened to me.”

I still can’t read past that line.

The ink is smudged now. Probably from the tears. Maybe from my fingers tracing it over and over, like I can summon you back.

But I won’t.

I know that now.

You’re not coming back.

And I’ll never love again.

Not because I can’t.

But because I don’t want to.

You were it.

You are it.

And no one else deserves the better parts of me — the parts you helped me find.

So I’ll keep living with half a heart.

I’ll keep waking up to the dark.

And I’ll keep your memory alive in every moment I refuse to move on.

Not out of despair.

But out of devotion.

This is my promise.

My forever.

My last goodbye.