Someday I will come to love myself in all the ways you once claimed to do. I will accept the truths as lies and the lies as truths. I will allow myself to become pity at your mercy, your dog at beckon and call. No, I won't. Those are just the lies I've told myself for the last six years as I tried to wrap my head around the incomprehensible, the unattainable, the unrealistic. The life we built that became nothing but a Lie with an F in it.

I knew from the very beginning that nothing could every truly come from the journey I embarked on to track you down. I knew we would inevitably meet not a tragic end, just an end. An impassible end. Our end. I knew we would never work out, but I walked down that lonesome path all the same until my torch reached down and burnt the hand that had given it life and had carried it through the darkness in the futile, refutable attempt of finding light through the deep dankness of forest after forest after forest leaving behind scorched earth of heartbreak, pain, and loss.

Each footstep took me farther away from the me I had so avidly and desperately built through the blood in my mouth from a bit tongue, sweat falling from one bent and one raised brow, tears streaming uncontrollably like when we watched “The Fault In Our Stars.” An unaware you gazed up to see me silently sobbing above you while I held you closer than anyone else had ever gotten. I stared deep into your eyes and saw a look I cannot shake to this very day.

You looked at me as your entire expression softened more than just your tearful eyes and hand that gracefully caressed my cheek followed by the tenderest kiss that I can recall to this day. We breathed in each other and rediscovered the fake breathing that had sparked everything that night so long ago, the night that meant so much more to me than I could ever manage to put into words for you. I knew right then, right there, right away that I wanted you in my life no matter the cost I would have to pay. And you made me pay through the teeth over and over and over again until I had nothing left to give, nothing left to live for anymore. I still found more to give you.

I bled onto the pages I gave and read aloud to you in ways I didn't believe I could ever accomplish again. I poured my soul out to you with a still-beating heart clutched in my outstretched hand, yet you still walked away. You took everything I had to give and walked away. You tore me down, tore down everything I had become, everything I once held as truth and courage and character. You created a new tabula rasa to craft anew. And I let you.

I willingly washed away the parts of me that didn't suit you. I threw bricks through the windows of my soul while we watched it wither away until only the bare patchwork frame remained. I lost myself in the forest of your soul. I became the trees that sheltered and hid away every transgression we experienced, every attack we launched at each other, every empty field our love-bombing left in our wake.

As our end approached, I watched it come on like a tidal wave knowing full-well it would leave me utterly destroyed, decimated, distraught. I sat and watched as it washed away everything we had built, everything we had known, every lie and truth we ever told. I watched as it carried our life away. I drowned as the current dragged me away to the unknown depths of the seas of misery. I plummeted as the shell of myself drifted along alone with no home to belong.

I found myself sitting at the bottom of the schism we had created, now filled with the remnants of all we had ever known. I reached out and touched each one of them one last time before letting go forever. I felt the weight push down on my chest as the ocean of our love forced every breath out in exaggerated sighs of exhaustion. My chest heaved under the strain but no life came and I found myself fake breathing alone in a sea filled with empty promises, forgotten confessions, shattered pictures without frames.

I found myself alone, wrecked, destroyed. I found myself lost in the expanse of emptiness. I found myself lost with no direction home, no knowledge of how I got there. I found myself with no one to revel in the love I no longer had left to give. I found myself a ghost, a haunting, a shadow of the man I had once created, and of the one you did within me.

I found myself alone atop a mountain with no means, no desire, no want of contacting you. I found myself alone in the wilderness of my thoughts trying to sort out what I had become. I found myself driving alone along a back-country road through unknown towns without a destination or belonging, but towards a calling I did not understand. I found myself alone and freed from the concrete-blocks tied to shackles I had clamped around my legs to keep me in that churning ocean for years.

I found myself; alone. I found myself; without you. I found myself; alive and breathing. I found myself; heart beating, pounding, yearning anew. I found myself; the self I had long thought lost and abandoned. I lost the me you created, the me you envisioned, the me you so desperately wanted and needed.

I found myself. And someday, I will love Dyllan Jay as much as I loved you and I will let it consume me as you once had. But, for today, I found myself and that is enough.