When Something Beautiful Ends

I am no stranger to endings.

It’s always like this; they sneak up on you until they’re staring you directly in the face, begging you to challenge the fact that you can’t do anything about them. It’s almost cruel, facing the end, knowing that permanence is a neat trick we made up to make things seem stable.

You feel a tightness in your chest, an invisible force with its grip around your heart, and you know that the end of something is here. You can’t do anything about it but stop and watch. Because by the time we realize something is over, when we can finally wrap our heads around the fact that it’s done, it’s already gone.

Often, endings come without warning and without notice. When the thing that is ending is hard, when the end is something you need, it’s easier to swallow. But when something gorgeous comes to a close, it’s impossible to get down. How can I accept that this is it? How can I let this go?

It’s tough. It’s like watching the world’s greatest sunset, actively willing that the colors will stay and your want for it to never leave your sight will cause it to pause. But the sun will drop below the earth and the colors will fade and the sunset will never look that way again. No matter how badly you want it to stick around, it can’t. It wouldn’t want to.

When something beautiful ends, we should appreciate the fact that we got to experience it at all. It’s a strange sort of sadness, knowing that something might not necessarily be bad, but it might not necessarily be right either, which is why it has to go. We have to accept that these things were not meant to stay, not forever, and not for now. They were meant to be what they were, a beautiful but temporary thing, but they were never meant to be ours for long.

When something beautiful ends, we should remember that we have the strength to let it go. We should know that we could handle walking away, and leave this thing behind. We should know that we have the ability to keep our eyes trained forward, always knowing that something just as good, if not better, will come our way.

When something beautiful ends, we should smile at the memories we get to keep. We should laugh at ourselves for believing we have much more control over life than we really do. And we should seek out beautiful beginnings, and the start of something new.