We Let Go of Each Other's Hands Before We Let Go of Each Other's Hearts

We forgot to let go of each other’s hearts before we let go of each other’s hands. We forgot how hard it is to distance yourself from the person you love the most without hurting them. We forgot that we didn’t walk together anymore; we walked separately. Dependence, damage, contempt, and monotony got the best of us and changed us. And now neither of us see the same reflection when we look in the mirror.

Letting go of each other’s hands sounds like a goodbye, but we’ve said goodbye so many times that our hearts have decided that it was always the same. Disconnecting your hearts before your hands, recognizing that you don’t love each other anymore, is different and often easier than letting your heart beat faster when you’re with each other.

We forgot to give ourselves space, to get some air, to enjoy our alone time the same way that we spent time together. We forgot that love is not dependence and now we only know how to be together and hate each other, because our hearts don’t know how to beat separately.

We forgot to love ourselves

We forgot to love ourselves, and therefore we decided that it was time to separate. But what we said with words didn’t reflect how we felt in our souls, and so the resentment made its way into my organs, and it started to cut them up into little pieces.

We forgot to be ourselves. We became two strangers who felt nothing but hate, and now all we do is hurt each other. We feel alone, betrayed, empty. We don’t know how to live without the other by our side.

But most of all, we forgot to forget ourselves and recognize that we don’t really love each other. We love the love that we imagine between us, but it isn’t real. It’s just an illusion that we created while we were dreaming with our eyes open.

We started to depend on each other

We forgot to be ourselves and started to depend on each other as if there were no life beyond each other’s hugs. We started to fear contradicting ourselves and we silenced our voices out of fear that a single word would break our idyllic bond.

We stopped loving ourselves so we could love each other more until we faded away and lost ourselves in a relationship that had no meaning. The love I had for you turned into the fear of losing you. And the fear of losing you turned to hating you, because I couldn’t love you anymore once my identity was taken away.

Think about it. It was then, when we stopped respecting ourselves, that we realized that our love wasn’t love anymore, but a suffocating bond that was really hurting us.

We decided to stop depending on each other and let go of each other’s hands, but it was already too late, because our hearts didn’t understand why it hurt so much to stop seeing each other, and we were still attached to each other. Dependence had turned us to ashes and we no longer knew how to be what we were before we met each other.

We had to learn how to be ourselves

So, after everything we had gone through, we had to relearn how to love ourselves. We had to accept the pain that we’d inflicted upon ourselves out of the fear of being alone.

We started to recognize that we had voluntarily given up our identities and that there was no one to blame but ourselves and our need to be attached to someone at any price. We understood that, when it comes to love, we should never stop being ourselves, and we finally were able to say goodbye.