You’re the kind of person who’s always missing someone. There’s always someone who left too soon with too few explanations. You’re the one who gets left.

You don’t do the leaving, even when you know you should. Leaving feels like quitting, so you stay patient, you stick it out. You put up with agony, confusion, and anger in hopes that this time, THIS time, your efforts will pay off.

They don’t.

You’re the one who gets left, and each time you cry into a bottle of wine with your best friend, you tell yourself, “Never again.

Next time I’ll be careful.

Next time I’ll leave first.”

But you know you won’t. You know you love too big, too bright, too loud. You’re never quite sure if this is your biggest weakness or greatest strength. So you know there will be another, and you know you will have to deal with the leaving, but you endure, you endure, you endure.

The people who don’t get it call you nasty names: desperate, needy, crazy. The ones who know you know that your heart is just too big not to love in a terrifying way, a way that sets people on edge, makes things move at an accelerated rate.

You’re not even always mad at people who leave, at least not for leaving. You might be mad for their methods: nothing makes you more angry than the ones who just fade out and leave you scrambling, clutching the shattered pieces of what you thought it was. But the good ones, the honest ones, you can’t make yourself really be mad at them. Everyone has baggage to deal with, and you never want to hold someone captive. People are going to leave, you know this. Because

you are the one who gets left.

So you take your time to be sad. You lay in bed and you cry. You cling to those first moments when you wake up before you remember what happened, the moment of ignorance before you recall. But you know you’ll pick yourself up and keep loving in your big way.

Because you are the one who gets left.

But you are also the one who loves.