I love you. I love you so much. Even after all this time I love you, and for the first time it doesn’t hurt. Loving you hurt me every second that we were together, and loving you after we broke up hurt. It was only when I stopped loving you that I could allow myself to love you again. This type of love is the purest I’ve ever felt for you because there’s no expectation, no pressure, nothing except me and my feelings. My feelings wavered so much during our 11 months but my love for you didn’t, not until long long after. I celebrated our anniversary, I sat down with myself and I sat through my emotions and I cried and yelled and screamed your name until I was fine. And afterwards, I felt relief, the relief that I had craved for more than a year and the relief that I had tried to substitute with devotion. I was devoted to you, I loved you better than anything else and I knew that you loved me too even though I could never be sure of how much. You talked me through my hard emotions and held my face tenderly and I knew you loved me. But you were also the woman who let me down, who accused me of horrible things who let her anger burn the ground she stood on who let her insecurities consume her. All the reasons you were awful for me and all the reasons I was awful for you tainted our love and poisoned us slowly. And yet I can now sit calmly and say that I love you without any of that, I forgive you. For hurting me, for letting me hurt you, for dragging it out, for being so angry. I forgive you for all of it and I love you again. We will never date again and that thought fills me with peace, it’s what lets me love you the way I do now. And that’s why I’m never sending this letter to you. I love you but it’s a peaceful kind of love, so different from the passionate fire that I burned for you during our relationship. This peace makes me happy, happy to remember you happy to keep your paintings and happy to love you. For so long, loving you meant that I was getting hurt and now it doesn’t, in a way that feels more real and attached than anything ever has. I told you had I had learned to love before you but feeling what I’m feeling now, I know that was a lie. You are my first love You are my first heartbreak You are my burden that I’m setting to rest. Loving you wasn’t enough to save our relationship but I’m so glad it played out the way it did. So whether we become friends or whether we never talk again, I’ll always hold you in my heart and this time it wont be the way a dagger rests on the flesh of a wound but rather the way an easy smile grazes a beautiful woman’s face. I hope you take care, I hope you rest easy and I hope that you feel that I love you the way I never could’ve imagine before. Goodbye <3