I Still Love Her, Even Though She Pretends I Don’t Exist

Raw truth from the edge of heartbreak, isolation, and the weight of staying alive.

Note: This piece contains reflections on loss, addiction, and suicidal thoughts. It is shared not as a cry for help, but as an offering of truth… for anyone else who has loved deeply and survived the silence.

It’s been two years.
Since she vanished.
Since the door closed and no explanation followed.
Since silence became my answer.

She didn’t scream.
She didn’t curse me out.
She just… left.
And still… I love her.

Not the ghost she became.
Not the stranger who walked past me at a music event with someone new and couldn’t even look at me.
But the woman I held.
The one who used to laugh with her whole body, who once looked at me like I was the answer.

That version of her…
the one I protected, prayed with, cooked for, held through ceremony, wrote poems for,
watched sleep like something sacred…
still lives in me.
Even if I no longer live in her world.

If you’re reading this with a chest full of ache and nowhere to place it…
I see you.

If you gave everything you had…
your time, your money, your loyalty, your patience, your softness,
your damn soul…
and still ended up alone…

You’re not crazy.

You’re just at the edge of the fire where love used to be.

I’ve devoted my whole life to love.
To women.
To relationships.
To healing.
To showing up.

I’ve shouted for feminism from the rooftops.
I’ve held women through trauma, through birth, through breakdowns.
I’ve watched over them in rituals, in grief, in silence.
I’ve bent my spine to protect them from harm.

And still… here I am.

Alone.

None of it mattered.

Since her, I’ve nearly become a father; twice.
Both children lost before they ever took a breath.

Do you know what it does to a man
to dream of holding life
only to bury it before it’s born?

I’ve done all the work.
All the right things.
Therapy. Meditation. Breathwork. Ceremony.
Stillness. Journals. Sobbing into the void.

But inside…
I’m starting to rot.

Because something in me is changing.
And I’m scared of what it might become.

I’m jaded.
I’m tired.
I’m starting to associate women with pain.

The people I loved the most…
the ones I gave my tenderness, my attention, my full presence…
have become the ones who disappeared,
gaslit me,
blocked me,
abandoned me in the name of boundaries.

And I’m the one who still gets called unsafe.

If I acted the way some of them have…
I’d be in jail.
I’ve been manipulated, emotionally & physically abused, left in states of collapse,
and then told I’m the one who couldn’t hold space.

I’m not saying this to erase what women go through.
I’m saying this to tell the truth:

Hurt isn’t gendered.
Abuse isn’t gendered.
Ghosting isn’t gendered.

Cruelty wears all faces.

And I’m starting to wonder:
What was the point of any of it?

What’s made it harder is the way community has quietly vanished too.

Every time a relationship ends,
I don’t just lose the person…
I lose the world around them.

I’ve been uninvited.
Excluded.
Edges of events, no longer center.
People were forced to pick sides,
and I became the one no one wanted to risk standing next to.

I’m not embraced.
I’m tolerated.

I’m not welcomed.
I’m managed.

And I’m so, so tired of being a ghost in the places I once helped build.

And when the heartbreak cracked something deeper…
I disappeared, too.

For four months, I didn’t see another human.
No one called.
No one came.

I spiraled into addiction.
Waking. Using. Sleeping. Numbing.
Over and over.
Just trying to forget the sound of her voice.
Trying to escape the kind of ache you can’t name without breaking open.

Nobody knew.
Or maybe they did…
but caring from a distance is safer than showing up.

That’s what I learned.

People love to perform concern,
but few know how to enter a room where someone is dying inside.

A few weeks ago, I passed out alone in my home.
I hit my head on the tile.
I got concussed.
And for a moment… I thought I was dying.

And do you know what I felt?

Relief.

Not fear.
Not sadness.
Relief.

Because maybe that would be the end of the ache.
Maybe this long, slow heartbreak could finally let go of me.

I’ve been wondering, more than I want to admit,
if maybe death is the solution to my pain.

Not because I want to die.

But because sometimes, living with this much tenderness
feels like its own kind of slow erosion.

And here’s where it gets harder to explain:

I’ve surrendered.

Not in bitterness. Not in strength.
In the way a body sinks when it’s too tired to swim.
In the way a candle surrenders to the dark when its flame finally flickers out.

I’ve surrendered to the truth that I may never hear from her again.
No apology.
No phone call.
No small sign that what we had was real.

And still… I love her.

I love someone who won’t even acknowledge I exist.
Who erased me like a chapter that never belonged in her book.

And I feel insane for that.
Insane for still loving someone who will never open the door again.
Insane for holding a candle no one’s coming to stand beside.

But this is what’s real:

My heart loves who it loves.

And I can’t force it to stop.
I’ve tried.
I’ve screamed at it.
Bargained with it.
Begged it to choose someone easier, safer, closer.

It won’t.
Because real love doesn’t end just because someone walks away.

And I’ve stopped trying to kill the part of me that still loves her.

Now, I just hold it.
Gently.
Like a bruise I no longer flinch to touch.

And yet… in this hollowed-out space of destruction and surrender…
something wild has begun to grow.

Clarity.
Purpose.
Art.

It’s unbelievable, the amount of beauty pouring through me.
It doesn’t feel like mine. It feels like the ache itself is speaking.
Like the grief cracked open a portal, and now creation won’t stop rushing in.

Painting. Writing. Sculpting. Building immersive worlds out of heartbreak.

I’ve realized:
This is part of my work.
To alchemize pain into something people can feel.
To transform silence into song.
To take the devastation and shape it… into stories, into color, into breath.

This isn't a silver lining.
This is the fire itself… forging me into something new.

And maybe that’s why I’m still here.

I still love her.
But I will not die for someone who pretends I was never real.

And maybe you’re here too…
still orbiting around a person who ghosted you and called it healing.
Still hoping the silence will eventually say something kind.

Let me say it for them:

You deserved better.

So we walk.
Not because we’re healed.
But because we’re still alive.

We carry what they left us.
We build beauty from what they didn’t stay to see.
We stop begging for closure and start becoming it.

You can still love them.

Just don’t make that love your coffin.

You are allowed to be hurt.
You are allowed to be angry.
You are allowed to say… this broke something in me.

But don’t confuse heartbreak with failure.

You loved hard.
That’s not weakness.
That’s proof.

This is where you return to yourself.
This is where it begins again.
Not with their voice…
with your own.

Still here.
Still soft.
Still walking.

With you.

</3 Echo