What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger.

What is heartache?

That is easy --- that pain in your chest when you love someone so much and you realize that they don't care. When you lie awake at night and think of everything you could have been and know that it's just one-sided, and that nothing you can do or say will ever change that.What is loss?

Another easy one --- it's watching that person choose someone just like you, only not you. Someone better, younger, smarter, and more gorgeous. That's when you also learn what hate is, because only hate born from the same womb of something so precious as tenderness and love can be so utterly devastating. That is when you lose everything you were before, and become bitter and sarcastic. It is a different view one sees when the world isn't black and white, good and evil anymore. This is loss, when you realize that you don't miss it anymore.

In this we also learn what cruelty is. And pain, jealousy, fear, rage. All of that, one can learn in a single afternoon sitting in a room with someone you've known and loved for years; silently watching as this person tears your world apart piece by piece with only one glance and a handful of words.

But alas --- what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger, as they say. When I learned what that true pain was, with its depression and angst, I learned also what strength is. When one travels to the dark side of the moon, to Hell and back, you become numb to that fear of the dark, that sense of panic near the fire.

It’s do or die, and I somehow chose to live.

One day, maybe tomorrow, maybe in years, you'll go through the same trials as me and find out the truth. And the truth is this: I can now be me, not the shadow of who I could have been, who we could have been.

Now, I am in love with someone new --- quite on accident I assure you. And when we lie together, holding one another, confessing our dreams and sins --- I don't think of you.

I think of us, this wonderful accident and I, and I'm happy.

Truly, utterly happy.