Letting Go
Letting go does not come naturally to us.
Yet, I want to tell you what letting go of you is like.
Letting Go.
If there’s one thing we all need to stop doing, it’s waiting around for someone else to show up and change our lives. Just be the person you’ve been waiting for. At the end of the day, you have two choices in love – one is to accept someone just as they are and the other is to walk away. We owe it to ourselves to live the greatest life that we’re capable of living, even if that means that we have to be alone for a very long time.
Before trying to let go, I stopped trying to go back to the first time we met and wonder what went wrong, I stopped trying to understand why you stopped calling or why you promised something you couldn’t fulfill. I stopped letting you consume my mind and I stopped asking people about you, waiting for them to tell me something that would make me happy, waiting for them to give me the reassurance that you couldn’t give me and waiting for them to tell me not to give up on you.
I gave up on you. And I’m glad I did.
Because I tend to forget about everyone else and everything I’m trying so hard to accomplish and focus on why you can’t see me the way I see you, why I couldn’t steal your heart the way you stole mine and why it’s always one-sided. I tend to take you out of the equation and blame myself for everything. I tend to blame myself for not being good enough for your love or not being the person you’re looking for.
I get it now, I get how people can destroy themselves, I get how people can ruin their lives by focusing only on the person who couldn’t love them back and trying so hard to change that reality. I get it.
We don’t blame ourselves for loving the wrong person, we blame ourselves for why they couldn’t love us back. We trust them with our hearts even though we just met them and we wonder why they couldn’t take care of it and we allow them to convince us that their love will be our triumph, it will be what we need for our own validation, it will be all we need to complete us.
We allow them to make us feel incomplete because we don’t try to stop and look at what they failed to give us, who they failed to be and how incompatible we really were.
I stopped letting you make me feel incomplete. I complete myself.
I stopped waiting for you to make me feel secure. My heart was never going to be safe with you.
With letting go, this is me accepting that you’re leaving. It’s my acknowledgment that there’s no further argument to make, no angle left to take, no plea or bargain I could wager that could get you to change your mind and stay. This is my subtle resignation to our downfall. This is the crack running between our two hearts that turned into a valley and engulfed us. It’s my acceptance of all I couldn’t bridge.
This is me knowing that we don’t get a do-over – not on the last night I spent asleep beside you or the last time I told you I loved you or the first moment I felt us start to drift apart. I know we don’t always get second chances. I know I do not get to go back in time and kiss you slower, love you stronger, linger five extra minutes in bed every morning that I woke up beside you. This is me knowing that I can’t rewind history and ask you what was wrong each evening that you came home with a puzzle in your eyes but no answer on your lips. This is me knowing we don’t get to go back.
This is my acceptance that I’m going to miss you. That there are going to be nights where I curl up in bed with a novel and a warm mug of tea and your absence on the left side of the bed is a chasm that swells and envelopes me. That for a long time I am going to see you everywhere – in second floor windows, in the faces of strangers, in the photos and memories that tear on my heartstrings for months after you’re gone. This is the realization that missing you is going to become a second heartbeat in my body, strong and thrumming inside of every place where you lingered and then left. These are my weakened vital signs, beating out of sync with yours for a while.
This is my knowing life goes on. Knowing that someday I will not think of love as a feeling that’s exclusive to you and I, as crazy as that seems to me right now. That eventually I’ll meet someone new – someone who loves the foods you hate and laughs at things you don’t find funny and appreciates the parts of me that you once left undiscovered. That some days, in the early morning hours, I’m going to wake up beside them and forget – just for an instant – that it is not your body tangled in mine. This is me knowing that those moments will defeat me – that I’m going to need to practice standing at the edge of your abyss without falling in completely. This is my hoping the discrepancy shrivels with time.
This is me knowing that I have to let you go. That no matter how much I love you or how hard we work at this or how badly we both want each other to be happy, we are never going to be the right partners for each other. This is my acceptance that the best things are never straightforward and that I want you to take whatever crooked, twisted path you need to take if it will lead you towards your dreams. This is me knowing that I have to do what’s right. That sometimes the best thing you can do for someone you love is to let them go – to do more, feel more, be more than the person they ever could ever have become by your side.
So this is me unclasping my fingers.
This is my parting, my reluctance, my heartache and my final gift to you.
This is me letting you go.
