Goodbye

ChatGPT helped me to write the following letter as a closure to my past relationship that keeps lingering inside me.

Love,

I’m writing to name you with the truth I can hold right now: you were a fire in my life. Loving you changed me. I became someone else with you — more open, more wounded, more alive at times — and that’s engraved on my skin and in my memory.

I want to thank you for what I was able to be with you: for the intensity, for the laughter that still echoes in me, for the afternoons when the world felt meaningful. Thank you for the moments of light. I won’t erase the good, because it also showed me who I can be.

But I’m also writing because there are things that hurt and that I need to name in order to move forward: you left me with painful questions, with gaps that feed ruminations, with a longing for contact that I know is not good for me now. It hurts not knowing, it hurts the distance that remained when I still wanted more. It hurts the way I keep thinking of you as if you were a place to return to.

I’m not looking for blame to punish us, but boundaries to protect myself. That’s why today I decide to protect myself: I will stop writing to you, waiting for your notifications, searching for signs where there are none. Not because I don’t remember you or because it doesn’t hurt; precisely because it does. Because I need space to heal without reopening the wound every time nostalgia rises.

I forgive you and I forgive myself for the things we did wrong; and I’m grateful, even though it’s hard, for everything I learned. I promise to be gentler with myself when you come to mind. I promise not to use your memory to punish myself or to idealize what we had.

I will keep you as part of my story — not at the center of my days. I will continue writing, creating, and finding ways to carry forward the mark you left without sinking under it. I want to learn to hold love and loss together, without one destroying the other.

I wish you, as much as I can from afar: that you find what you seek, that you care for what you love, and that life may also be soft with you sometimes. And I wish myself — that I keep caring for me, naming me, and staying here.

With what I am now,

Samantha