Mine Truly

I once thought there was a person who saw me completely. Someone who loved me because of the chaos, not despite it. Someone who spoke in a way that felt like a spell, compelling me to strip away every piece of armour I ever learned to wear. I let it all be seen.

My heart. My illness. My fear. My softness.

And that is exactly where it hurt.

When everything inside me became too tangled to name, I turned to writing, the only place where my emotions have ever made sense. Surfacing a clarity, I had avoided for months, something shifted.

The real story was not about how he left.
The real story was about how I abandoned myself while trying to understand him.

A letter born from trembling hands and a heart trying to speak honestly for the first time.

His response in return, was unexpected and disarming changing the way I understand connection, loss, and the fragile architecture of love.

What you are about to read is not fiction.

20.01.2025

Dear Theron1,

My mind became a battlefield, swinging between longing and anger, crushed by the shame of how deeply I still miss you.

I do not miss my boyfriend. Not in the way people expect.

The part that breaks me is not losing a lover. It is losing my closest friend.

The person I could not wait to pour the depths of my mind into. The one who moved with me through every dream and hazy thought, sharing the countless possibilities of wonder.

Losing you felt like losing a part of myself.

Now I am left with sleepless nights, trying to understand how your eyes ever looked at me with a coldness that invites an ache pressing quietly against my chest.

I am still shocked by the way you sat in silence as my tears became more than a drizzling rain. I stood there with no armour, asking about the love that once burned so deeply, and you said,

“I lied to you so you wouldn’t be upset.”

Even a single expression would have been enough, yet you looked at me with an indifferent face while your silence spoke louder than your words. And even with the weight of what I knew, I still gave you the part of me that felt true while each word landed in the most hurtful way, breaking my heart in ways I did not know it could break.

I lost myself in the name of loving you, letting your confusion decide my worth, and so I confess: as much as I am angry with you, I’m mad at myself too for lingering as the fool in your view.

Blindly living in emotions that dragged me down, never questioning the intentions hidden underneath to realise that your love never belonged to me, but to the reflection you searched for in my eyes.

When you became the man you once swore you could never be, the truth standing before you was more than your heart could carry, but I know now that the vessel that once carried you burned long before you knew.

Although I never dared to speak what felt due, the cruelty of the way you cut me like a thread makes a strange clarity settle in me.

I was not just mourning the loss of our relationship. I was grieving the version of me that existed. The expectations I carried, the future I imagined, the parts of myself I poured into you.

I now know that the only forever I have is with myself, and I choose to build from a place within where my tenderness can finally rest.

And so from here on, I make a promise to myself.

I will not abandon my dreams for warmth that cannot stay.

I will not dim my passion or silence my desires just to be chosen by someone who merely remains.

I will not bend my spirit to stay in a place that asks me to shrink.

I love myself not despite what I have endured but for the version of myself I am finally proud to be.

I grow the life that feels true to me.

I honour the path that rises to meet me.

And I choose myself fully and finally, without apology.

Thank you for leaving, because when you left, you brought me back to myself.

Mine truly,
Imi

As a hopeless romanticiser, my letter was sent through the actual post while my mind kept spinning in its compulsions, trying to justify the act of sending a handwritten letter in the twenty-first century.

Only when his email appeared in my inbox did I realise something deeper. I was not mourning the loss of a relationship. I was grieving the part of myself that hoped someone finally understood me.

The truth is, he was only a mirror, reflecting the parts of me I had quietly abandoned. The understanding I kept chasing in him was the one that waited for me within.

10.02.2025

Dear imi,

The truth is, the exhaustion of trying to love you wore me down deeply.