I do not know how to type this without my hands shaking, so excuse the chaos. I am not trying to sound wise or reflective. I am just spilling.
I was with this girl for five years. That is basically my entire youth. She was my first everything. She was the background noise of my life, the person I leaned on without even realizing I was leaning. Even after we broke up, we did not really break up. We stayed in that weird half-light space where you still talk every day, still check in, still orbit each other like the breakup did not fully land.
And I think I tricked myself.
I think I convinced myself she was still mine in some invisible way.
Recently I found out she had a casual makeout with some guy. Nothing wild. Nothing extreme. But my brain went nuclear anyway. The shock was not even about the act itself. It was about the sudden collapse of the version of her I had built in my head. The version where she would never do something impulsive. The soft, gentle, almost too good for this world version. The girl I believed did not feel physical hunger or loneliness the way I do.
I know that sounds naive.
I know it is wrong.
But this is genuinely what my head believed.
Then hearing her say things like she feels her body starving lately just broke something inside me. Not because she did anything wrong. She did not. She is single. She is allowed. It is me. I am the one who is stuck. I am still living mentally in some older time, clinging to the girl who cried with me during exams and held my hand through every stupid spiral.
The worst part is that my brain keeps feeding me intrusive images that feel like someone pressing a hot iron on my chest. It feels like my mind is punishing me for not moving on.
And to make all of this even harder, I was not perfect either. I hurt her. More than once. I made mistakes that I am ashamed of. So now there is guilt mixed with heartbreak and it feels like drowning in two different oceans at the same time.
I think I am posting this because I do not know how to let go of a version of someone that existed only in my mind. I do not know how to accept that she is a real human being with a body, impulses, messy decisions and change. I do not know how to accept that she is not the girl I dated at nineteen anymore. She is a whole new person, and I am stuck grieving someone who does not exist now.
If anyone has ever gone through this, the sudden and painful realization that your ex has a life of her own and a body of her own and choices you no longer get to know about, how do you handle it?
How do you stop your mind from torturing you with fake scenarios?
How do you accept that the story has ended while your heart is still flipping pages?
I feel insane.
And I feel so stupid for feeling like this.