The hardest thing to handle is when something wonderful ends. A relationship is always a hard thing to lose. You want to grab them and say “this can be better.” Sometimes, however, better or worse is not a choice which you can make.
What’s left is a hole. It is a longing for what was given and then taken away. It is a string of images that won’t leave your mind; an endless series of what-ifs and imagined endings that don’t seem to go away. A long line of whys.
But you are also left with a set of memories, good and bad, that you hold on to. You are left with lessons about who you are, and who you want to be. Memories of what you loved, and what was left wanting. You are left with precious experiences.
You can choose to be petty. You can choose to be angry and blame them for your sadness. You can choose to learn nothing. but you can also choose to remember the person, and to understand that they didn’t find what they wanted, either. You found each other because you felt completed in some way with them, but something prevented the pieces from fitting together.
When you promise to respect them, and then it is over, you have a choice to forget that respect and beg them to be what you wished they were – to plead with them to try more and harder – or to remember why you cared and agree to move forward in different ways. You have a choice to latch on to what about them completed you, or to understand what didn’t and hope that you both find the happiness which that missing piece will bring. You can choose to remember what it is that you loved, and to retain the respect for that… and because of that for them.
You can choose to take time to heal. You can choose to remember what was awoken in you; to use that thread to mend the hole and come out better for it. To take the time to let the wounds mend without allowing anything to fester in them. Not everything works out like intended, but everything gives you a chance to learn more about yourself and to become better because of it.
