When it ends, you busy yourself with other things. Music, friends, faux feelings for people who aren't her. And it works. Until one day, every distraction, every other thought, everything you used to fill her place in your world is gone. All that's left is a few distant memory of her that you're not even sure are accurate anymore, because you avoided them for so long.
Part of you wishes you could still remember. But most of you doesn't.
Still, you disregard your heart and replay those memories in your mind. You remember your favourite parts, and repeat them like a Top-40 radio station. In a moment of weakness induced by half a bottle of cheap wine, you called your mother and begged her to tell you something to take the heartache away. Her response of nothing stays the same forever, people move on and things change was enough for you to hang up and ignore her calls for a week.
You're no longer sure of what hurts the most. Your heart, from the vice it's been in since the words I think we're just no good for each other anymore came from those sweet lips you had just finished kissing. Or your brain, from regurgitating every moment with her, analysing every movement she made around you. The nervous way she would drum her fingers on your collarbone when she was too scared to talk about something. The way she would play with your fingertips and avoid your eyes when she was about to share something important with you. Her shallow breaths when she knew she had just upset you, because it upset her too. You recall the last time she did those things, and quickly shut that thought train down. Not just because it hurts - because it does, it's the worst you've felt since the first time she rejected you - but because thinking about your last time stirs up questions that you haven't thought about since before you were officially Santana and Brittany.
Like why wasn't I good enough? That's the one that's haunted you for a long time. At first it was do I want to be good enough? and then why aren't I good enough and now it's that small gesture of a past tense that ruins your entire day.
(In your dreams, she whispers that you were, you do and you are. But you normally wake up crying from those.)
Did she really love me? is next, which of course was once she loves me? and then am I sure she loves me? and it's the doubt that was always there which gnaws at your subconscious.
(You know that if you could ever work up the courage to ask, the answer would be yes, yes, yes. But that's a big price to pay, and those aren't the answers you want, even if she will give them willingly)
The true answer to these questions is hidden in memories, of mornings spent curled around each other, breathing and whispering and being and loving in tandem, as though you were the sand and she were the sea. You find yourself desperately hoping that she'll come back to you as assuredly as the sea.
Perhaps she did love you, perhaps she didn't.
You think that one day this love will eat away at you, until there is nothing left but a black hole where your emotions used reside.
And as pathetic as it sounds, you want this to happen. Need it, even.
Because if there's nothing left, then it can't happen again.
You won't do this with anyone else, and you sure as hell can't do this a second time.