"What She Took, What I Left Behind"

I stood in the doorway of our—no, her—apartment. The lease had always been in her name (I paid for it all,) but she made it clear I wasn’t welcome anymore. I wasn’t even sure why I came back. Maybe to make sure I had taken everything, maybe because I was still waiting for her to say something real, something that mattered. Maybe because I was still looking for the part of myself that I lost somewhere between loving her and losing myself.

The air smelled the same—faint traces of lavender, her favorite scent. I bought those candles. I bought everything. The couch, the television, the bed she slept in, the tuition she never had to worry about. It was my hands, my effort, my love that built this place, and yet, standing there, I felt like an intruder in my own history. A ghost haunting the wreckage of a love that was never real—not in the way I thought it was.

She had burned through my energy, my time, my money, and in the end, she burned me down, too. That’s the thing about narcissists—they take. They use. They consume until you’re nothing but a husk, and then they move on, their appetite undiminished. She would do it again. She always had someone lined up, some other man with open hands and an open wallet, ready to rescue her from the burden of effort. A sad way to get through life, but she didn’t know any other way. She never had to.

I picked up the last of my things—a hoodie she had claimed as her own, a book I never finished reading because I was too busy making sure she had everything she needed. Or everything she wanted. There was a difference, but I had ignored it for too long.

I left the key on the counter. A clean break.

The weeks passed in a haze of anger, grief, and silence. My mind was a battlefield, torn between missing her and hating her, between longing for what we had and knowing that what we had was never real. The memories played in loops—our laughter, our fights, the moments I caught her in lies and chose to believe her anyway. The nights I stayed up waiting for her to come home, the mornings she acted like I was the problem. The slow, creeping realization that I had been nothing more than a means to an end.

I tried to hate her. I wanted to hate her. It would have been easier that way. But hate requires energy, and I had none left to give.

I replayed the betrayals over and over, dissecting every detail. The text messages from unknown numbers. The way she tilted her phone away when I walked into the room. The late nights that stretched into early mornings, always with some flimsy excuse. And worst of all, the gaslighting—the way she turned it around on me, made me question my own reality.

“You’re paranoid,” she’d say, laughing just enough to make me feel stupid. “You’re overthinking. You always do this.”

And I believed her, because loving her meant trusting her. Even when the truth sat like a weight in my gut, even when I could hear the lies in the spaces between her words, I swallowed it all because I wanted so badly to be wrong.

But I wasn’t.

And now, here I was, hollowed out and exhausted, trying to understand how I had let this happen to myself.

Therapy became a necessity, not an option. I didn’t trust myself alone with my thoughts anymore. My therapist listened patiently as I unraveled it all—how I had loved her, how I had given everything, how I had been left with nothing.

“She didn’t just take your love,” my therapist said one day, her voice gentle but firm. “She took the part of you that believed in it. That’s the real loss.”

The words hit harder than I expected. I spent so much time grieving her that I never stopped to grieve myself.

I realized then—I wasn’t just mourning the end of a relationship. I was mourning the version of me that had existed before her. The version of me that still believed in unconditional love, that still thought effort meant something, that still felt safe in his own heart.

Time passed. Healing was slow, uneven. Some days, I felt nothing. Others, I felt everything all at once. I grew armored. Numb. I told myself that was a good thing—that if I couldn’t feel, I couldn’t be hurt again.

I stopped listening to music that made me feel anything. I avoided places that held memories. I built walls so high I forgot there was once a door.

I convinced myself that indifference was the goal, that if I could just stop caring, I’d be free. But that wasn’t true. Indifference is just another form of pain, just quieter. Just colder.

And then one day, while sitting on the floor of my new apartment, flipping through an old journal I had long forgotten, I found something buried in the pages.

A version of me I had lost.

The boy who once dreamed without fear, who laughed without hesitation, who felt safe in the world because he hadn’t yet learned otherwise. The boy who believed love was something simple and good, not something to be measured in sacrifices and suffering.

I traced my fingers over the words I had written years ago—before her, before the heartbreak, before I learned what it meant to be hollowed out. There was a lightness in those words, a hopefulness I no longer recognized. And in that moment, grief hit me in a way I hadn’t expected.

Not for her. Not for the relationship.

For me.

For the boy I had abandoned in my desperate attempt to love someone who never truly saw me. For the boy who had given everything without realizing he was giving himself away.

That was what I had left behind. That was the real loss.

And so, the next journey began—not in forgetting her, not in staying angry, but in reclaiming him. In nurturing him back to health. In finding my way back to the person I was before I learned how much love could hurt.

It would take time. It would take patience. But for the first time in years, I was willing to give those things to myself.

Because in the end, I was the only one who ever truly deserved them.