It Won’t Be Easy, But Please Let Them Go

Life goes on, it always does.

When your hair has silvered with age and your fingers have begun to tremble with wisdom, you do not want the weight of a ghost upon your shoulders. You must understand that sometimes people leave. They pack up all their belongings in large brown cardboard boxes and they turn to look at you with eyes you no longer recognize and they say to you I don’t need this anymore while handing your heart back. When they leave you like this, in a room with walls that have memorized the intimate details of your relationship, tuck your heart back in your chest and say to yourself it’s going to be okay.

Say to yourself, I will be okay. Because you will be.

Maybe you’ll always remember them; the sound of their voice, the way their face was sharp like folded origami, the way they smiled with their eyes and laughed a little too loudly. But more often than not, time will take pity on you. Time will shave down the angles of their face so when you close your eyes it all becomes a smudge of cheekbones and wet, red lips. Time will make it so you can’t remember how they sound when they hum under their breath while making you stir-fry on a Tuesday evening.

Time will make it so that one day, maybe years or maybe even weeks from now, you will bump into them at some place you’d never expect and you won’t feel as though the foundation of your life was falling apart. But before time can walk through the door they left ajar, you will think of them and only them.

This is okay. Lather in the knowledge and wholly encompassing feeling that you are human and you are fragile.

Time can only do so much for you though, you must force yourself to forget them as well. I’m not going to say it’ll be easy because it won’t. To tell you the truth, trying to forget them is a little like trying to forget a language you’ve spent decades learning. The words will always be on the tip of your tongue, the frayed consonants cutting the corners of your mouth until all you taste is blood.

It won’t be easy.

You will see them leant up against buildings that they are not. You will see them in coffee shops and sifting through the third aisle in a grocery store. You’ll taste them in the mouth of a stranger. Feel their hot breath against your ear, calling your name, while you get into bed at night. You will feel the warmth of their mouths in that first swig of whisky. And you will believe that you won’t ever forget the language of their love and the dips and curves of their body because at that moment in time, you won’t be able to comprehend what it truly means to pick yourself up from a battle gone wrong.

Forgetting them won’t be easy but it needs to happen because while they’ve exited through stage left, the show is only a quarter of the way through and we’re all counting on you.