The Art of Letting Go…

Dear you,

I wish for you to know something. Despite the disastrous way we ended, there was genuine love shared between us at one point. The ironic part is that both of us labeled this love to be sincere, pure ... but we were both misled. You will live inside a part of my heart until the day I draw my last breath and fade away from this world and move on to the next one. The memory of you that refuses to be evicted will grow with me, inching smaller and smaller until the space you take up becomes insignificant, a distant faded memory. A scar. An inconvenient reflection of forced growth.

I will forget how that anger felt, the one you planted in the core of my being… but I will never forget the way you looked at me the night you told me you loved me.

My heart often aches for you, sometimes in the dead of night she will cry your name out into the world hoping you’ll hear it and call back to me.

"Come back to me."

I touch our memories sometimes like an old book, running my fingers through its delicate pages, dried over time. On rainy days, or even when the sun shines too bright, the memories loom over me, echoing the sounds of when our timelines crossed.

It is only now that I've placed years of distance between who I was then and who I am now that I realize I can’t be mad at you for the choices you made in an effort to discover who you are simply because I thought I knew you. I picked at the parts of you that were rotten, and supplemented the rest with figments of my imagination. I started doing the work of two to convince myself I was happy, settling for the broken version of yourself that you were willing to give me. You breathed words of deceit into me each time our mouths enveloped one another's, and you touched me with hands stained with the perfume of countless others.

The first time I told you I loved you, I said that “I could set a clock with the times I catch myself thinking of you” and to this day I stand by those words. But the clock has grown old with me, and my troubled mind could allow no more. You will always have a bit of my heart in your pocket and I will always have a bit of the one I conjured up for you in mine. That is the curse and burden that comes when people fall in love, and then out. We can never fully eradicate ourselves from one another, but I’m finally finding myself in a place on my path where I can stop and dig a small hole off to the side in which I can bury your name in the hopes of never speaking it aloud again. I wish to never hear your voice again, and that the roots of your name grow downward and away from the light that now shines around me. I’ll carry your memories with me, the lessons engraved into my skin with the sharpness of your tongue.

I’ve never mastered the art of letting go, nor have I ever been in a position that was so full of genuine love it was overflowing and drowning me. I wish things were different, and I wish we were different. I hope burying your name grows a forest thick with love and success. Like the Amazon Rainforest, I want to admire your growth from afar but never get lost in you again. I’ve come to accept that the feelings and affection I had for you were so sincere and concrete they might never fade into neutrality and I’m okay with that. But I do accept that what we had was in the past and the feelings that linger sometimes come from nothing more than memories. We are not the people in this photo anymore, and that’s ok. We might never be the people in this photo again, hungry for one another and compatible in a way that felt like it was destined by the universe herself. And that’s okay. I’ll let go, and thats okay too.

Sincerely, Me