Dear Stranger,

I don’t know how to feel about you being the inspiration of this writing. You see, it’s been a long time since I last lied awake past midnight writing about my heartbreaks. I thought that I outgrew this. But here I am—at 1 AM staring at your dating profile, which clearly indicates that you’re currently active. 

What could you possibly being doing at this time on a dating app? Well, what am I doing there at this time? Nothing—just staring at your picture, trying to feel your presence as you’re so far out of reach. 

As I’m writing this out, I’m realizing how insane I sound. You see, I know that! I know this is crazy. I know that there’s no hope. I know that you’re moving on. You’re actively on a dating app looking for other women while I’m just as active on that app looking for you. Why? I don’t know. We aren’t going to match again. We aren’t going to meet again. 

But my heart cries out for you. I don’t know if it cries because our story ended before it even began. It’s laughable that I’m feeling this. It’s a deep pain fueled by a sense of shame that I’m feeling pain over someone I met a couple of times and who has probably already forgotten about me. It’s so invalidating that I don’t even know how to comfort myself when I shouldn’t even feel this hurt and sad over you. After all, you are a stranger. 

As you go on with your life—never once think of me—I’m lying here with a million questions. Intellectually, I know something is deeply wounded inside of you. But I can’t help it that my instinct is to question myself. I wonder what I did or said that triggered you. I wonder if there was something about me that turned you off. My head is filled with doubts. 

The strange thing is I find it comforting to see you active on a dating app everyday because it weirdly gives me a sense that you’re still available. That sense of comfort, however, is drifting away as I’ve started noticing a new pattern, suggesting that you may be with someone from Saturday evening to Sunday. Who could that person be? Someone you’re getting serious with? Why can’t it be me? And why am I feeling this way? Why am I so hurt? 

My whole body is shaking. My anxiety goes off the roof. I didn’t feel this way for a very long time—so long that I thought I outgrew it. But I didn’t outgrow it. I just never met a man who invoked this feeling in me again until I met you. 

For months, I was clinging on to the hope that maybe we’d reconnect and maybe you’d reply to my message. Intellectually, I’ve known that you won’t, but I somehow still held on to that hope. Today, it seems that you are with someone else, and my hope of ever seeing you again is becoming a dream that will never come true. Today is the day that I have to let that hope die for my own sanity. It’s going to be a painful process, but it begins today. I’d be lying if I said I no longer hold on to that hope. I still do, but that hope is being painfully killed by a million cuts. It will die in time, and I will suffer until then.

Goodbye, Stranger! 

The Woman You’ve Forgotten