I stopped watering your flowers. You know, the bouquet you got me a couple weeks ago. They were my favorite, just like you were my favorite. But now I’m done keeping the flowers alive, and I’m done trying to make you love me in the ways that I had loved you.

I think it stills feel strange to think about my feelings towards you in the past tense, but I don’t love you. I loved you. I loved who you were. Long-distance relationships are hard enough without dealing with the changes that college brings onto a person. The seeds we planted over the summer had so much hope, but when there’s only one person tending the garden, the flowers die. I didn’t even notice them wilting as we made our way through the fall and into the winter. I didn’t feel you fading away from me until you were gone, and you’d stole a little piece of my heart away with you in the process.

It's weird how things show so much life before they burn out, before they wilt. I really thought that we were flourishing. You were hours away, but we were making it work. Between the road trips, concerts, football games, parties, and those simple days when we just stayed in and fought over a bowl of pizza rolls, I felt that my chest really might burst from the gardens that were exploding from my rib cage. Of course, that was still when you let your light, and your love, keep us healthy.

But this isn’t a letter about gardens, and it isn’t written with the intent of blaming you for all of the ways we failed. This is a goodbye letter. This is a letter to let you know that I’m alright, that I’m not still holding on, that I’ve finally realized putting hope into us is like trying to bring dead carnations back to life. This is a letter to tell you that I hope, even though I’m the one with a dead bouquet on my desk, you’re happier now. I know we all say that in the end, but I mean it. I hope you find whatever I couldn’t give you at the bar. I hope that pretty girls and meaningless sex fill your expectations for the experience I was keeping you from. I hope that, at the end of the day, you can feel as happy as I did when I started to see the stems of the flowers bow.

For weeks I kept thinking that there were ways to salvage what was left of us. I realize now that I was wrong. I realize now that all of the times you said that you saw a future with me, it didn’t necessarily mean that you were the one. I realize that I was the only one nurturing the plants. I realize now that what’s best for both of us is packing up and moving on, and that starts with nurturing myself - letting myself grow with my own light and letting those flowers die.

I’ve stopped watering them. I deserve better.