I didn't want to go down a road I'd already been on. Why was it so hard to turn away from something that was already gone?

I needed to walk away. I needed to walked away without trying to fix him or our relationship, but leaving the pieces broken wasn’t easy. It was like leaving shards of the most beautiful glass scattered across your floor, because the pieces were too shattered. And now, you had to step cautiously around the brokenness in order not to slice yourself on the remains.

I hurt myself by hurting you.” His face wore a look of compassion. I hated that look, because it reminded me that he was a good person, that he had tried over and over to apologize. He unwittingly brought out the part of me that I hated, and I projected that hate onto him, because it was easier to hate someone else than to hate myself. Tears poured out of my eyes. And he wrapped his arms around me, holding me as wept. And I hated that his arms still felt good.

Maybe there are some people you can’t unlove no matter how hard you try. Maybe there are some people you stay connected to, because they’ve hurt you to your very core. You keep hoping that somehow the pain can be resolved if they finally do the right thing, but the right thing can never be done because it had to have been done in the past.

I felt his pain as my own and I wanted to touch him, feel him, reach inside his fractured heart and pull out all of the love he buried inside. I wanted to kiss every inch of his skin. I wanted to feel his brokenness against mine, like if we held each other hard enough something within each of us would finally heal.

The other thing about falling in love: the harder you fell, the easier it was to get hurt. Maybe that’s why it was called falling in love; at some point there was a crash at the bottom that could shatter someone into a million pieces.

Mistakes we make in the past sometimes keep us connected. Heartache keeps us connected. We want the past to be forgotten, to forget the people we’ve hurt and those who have hurt us and yet, it’s always there, in the periphery of our consciousness, because it has defined part of our life. A part of who we are.

She felt a wave of fury overtake her as she looked at him standing there naked. She loved him with everything she had, but the love ripped her heart right out.

Because of that, he didn't know how to love someone who actually loved him. He had learned a twisted, tormented kind of love filled with pain and exploitation.