I'm writing this for one simple reason: to thank you. I want to thank you for every single scar and bruise you left on my heart. I'm not writing this out of spite, or to take low-key shots at you, I am truly thanking you. See, I've always been told that you're greatest love comes after your greatest heartbreak. I always found that cliche, until I felt that extreme heartbreak everyone was talking about. The kind of heartbreak that you don't think you'll bounce back from.

Thank you for all those night I laid awake wondering whose bed you were actually sleeping in. Those nights seemed like an unfair sense of torture that I never though I could endure, but I did. I laid there wondering if you were actually going to sleep or if that was just your plan to get my name to stop popping up on your phone for that night. I thank you for this because it taught me that not every person that tells you they love you, actually loves you. Through you, I learned that people can come to you dressed as everything you've ever imagined but still be poison to your soul. I learned not to trust everyone, especially the ones that have to say the same apology over and over.

Thank you for cheating on me. I'll never know the exact number and I don't think I care to. The important thing was, I learned how to forgive someone, not because they deserved it, but because I did. No part of what you did deserved a honest "it's okay," but my heart deserved to let go of the pain that I really had no control over. I learned that not every apology is an honest one, especially when it contains the same lines from the previous one, just with a different girls name. Thank you for showing me that some people will never change.

Thank you for making me stronger. Even though there were days when I felt like your words were the knifes in my heart that would make me nothing but a ghost, those words made me stronger. You told me I wasn't good enough, I believed you. You told me it was my fault that you couldn't stay true to me, I believed you. You told me that you were as good as I could do, I believed you. But I also took those words, the words that I once believed and proved you wrong. I no longer believe any of the words you once told me, and began to make my own truth. I fought the words that you tattooed in my memory and replaced them with kinder, truer words. With words that told me that one day I would find someone who appreciated and loved me for the glorious mess that I was, and still am. Turns out, I was the one that was right.

We had a long, rocky relationship. I felt emotional pain that I didn't even know existed, and that I certainly didn't think I would recover from. Without the pain you caused me and the unfair way you treated me, I wouldn't have had to pick myself up off the floor and recreate myself. A person who is stronger, more beautiful, and more loved. A person who has found someone who has the purest and most honest intentions with my heart, and is healing every scar you made. Without those scars, I don't think I could appreciate him the way I do. So again, thank you. Thank you for allowing me to learn to love the sound of my feet walking away from what isn't right for me.