Dear Ghost,
It’s been seven years since our breakup. We were just a couple of kids, young, insane, and so passionately in love. You lived across the lake, and I met you on the school bus. I fell instantly in love with you. I gave you all of me, and you gave me all of me too. You helped me out of eating disorder. You helped me to be comfortable in my weirdness. You showed me what true love really was. We showed that each other.

That was the last time I ever gave my heart freely to someone. Nobody could compare to you. You were perfect. Demented, but perfect, and I loved you and us in all our flaws. But of course, craziness always takes a toll, and I felt that I needed someone stable. I spent years trying to forget about you, but never really got over you the way I should have. I keep trying to convince myself that love isn’t all about the butterflies, fire, and passion. It isn’t all about being so wrapped up in someone that all you really want to do with your life is freeze that moment. It isn’t all about looking at someone in seeing perfection in all of their flaws. That love like that can’t withstand reality. It doesn’t make you grow. It doesn’t experience the world, because you don’t want to leave that world between the two of you.

I’ve kept wrestling your ghost all of these years. I’ve kept searching for love like that again. Maybe not in you, but in someone else, but with all of these people, it never feels like love. I can’t find that fire in anyone else, because I’m not that person anymore. That person died along with our relationship, along with so many years of getting into the wrong situations. Now you really are dead. How is anyone supposed to compete with the actuality of your ghost? I shouldn’t be comparing all of my relationships to the one I had with you, but I do, and I can’t help it.