The Night My Heart Went Missing

The Vanishing

He was gone.  Vanished into the night and never left a word.  He once told me he would die if I ever left, so shouldn't he be dead now?  I frantically called his mom in the middle of the night and she said he would turn up.  His best friend said I deserved better, but I didn't know what that meant.  All I wanted was to see him.  To know he was okay.  My heart was breaking.  Didn't they understand that?  I couldn't eat.  I couldn't sleep.  Nothing mattered but finding where he was.

I played back our conversations in my head as I laid awake in bed.  The time I told him his friend liked him and he said I didn't know better.  The time he took me to lunch to meet his parents and how happy they were.  That last time I saw him, he told me he could never be with someone like me but then asked me to never leave him all in the same breath.  What did it all mean?  What was I supposed to do?  Why did he do this to me?

That night and every night for a week, I cried myself to sleep, hoping he would pop up in my messages, but he didn't.  I had never felt like this before and it hurt to know that the one person I loved the most in the world was gone.  He had left me with all this pain and didn't even bother to let me know that he was alive.  That's all I wanted.  To know he was alive and to ask him why.  One day, my tears dried up and my heart didn't skip a beat at the mention of his name anymore.  I only winced.  

There were so many things I wanted to tell him.  Secrets that only we knew.  I wanted to hear answers from his lips.  About what fell apart between us when I wanted nothing more than to be with him.  But none of that happened, so I went through the motions of my life to make it seem as if I were alive.  Inside, my heart was still broken.  Still searching for him.  And then one day, I decided to say good bye to him.  I wrote a letter about what could've been , for that was what hurt me the most.  Our dreams and plans.  

Suddenly, there he was on my doorstep, asking me to take him back.  I knew he left because of his own insecurities.  Because he believed he didn't deserve happiness.  Because he loved but didn't know how to be loved.  He had never meant to hurt me.  I knew that now.  He hadn't left me.  He had ran away from his own fears, and I forgave him.  Forgiving him didn't mean forgetting.   I knew he had to fight through his own demons, and I mine.  I had been searching for his answers, but what I really needed were mine.  I wasn't lost anymore.