It was the hardest thing I ever had to do. To let him go. I knew in my head I was helping him by letting him go so he could work out his problems and come to terms with his past. But that knowledge did nothing to soothe my broken heart. And it still doesn’t.

Our relationship went downhill that day he came home early from work. The man I thought he was, the person I thought I knew didn’t exist. Not really. And we weren’t the same after that. Our relationship changed, we changed. I just didn’t want to see it.

It snuck up on us slowly, like a silent killer in the middle of the night. We struggled and dragged on for months. I know I let it go on for far too long. But I couldn’t bring myself to give up. I couldn’t let him go, because he was the one for me. My everything. Living my life without him was not an option. Though as time went on it was a scenario I feared was inevitable.

We became masters at avoiding issues, and choosing what we wanted to see, what we wanted to believe about each other. But we couldn’t ward off the real world interminable. It slammed its way in every time I’d almost succeeded in convincing myself everything was fine. It made me face the facts: we were not okay. And with every new bump it became harder to pretend.

When he got arrested we got into a rapid decline. The wall I’d build up to keep us in our fantasy world crumbled down and for the first time I seriously considered the fact that I might not be able to help him. My love for him might not be able to save him from himself.

From then on things went bad rapidly. I constantly felt as if I couldn’t catch my breath, as one thing after another was thrown at us and set us back. We never had time to recover. I couldn’t pretend anymore and it quickly brought us further into destruction until crawling back up was impossible. Because the problems had gotten to be too much, they’d finally buried us alive.

I honestly believe he never meant to hurt me. He loved me. And it was not like he didn’t want to change, he just couldn’t. People tried to convince me otherwise. They said: “He’d have stopped stealing if he’d loved you enough”, but I know that’s not true. I know he loved me as much as I loved him. He left because of the love we shared and I let him go for the same reason.

I pray that someday we’ll be able to find our way back to each other. Because although I might be able to live my life without him, my world will never feel complete without him in it.