I often think about human connection, and how whether romantic or platonic, it feels unhuman to know somebody, and then to suddenly one day, not. It’s an unfathomable concept to me, as many things in this life—with its complexities and intricacies—time and time again, are.
“You are a language I am no longer fluent in but still remember how to read.” When I first read that, besides it being entirely soul-crushing, it immediately begged the questions: If we connect with people, will that connection ever completely go away? And do we want it to go away? Or is it something we have to believe is going to eventually fade, so that we can connect again without catching glimpses of what formerly was? I don’t have the answer to any of those questions.
The concept of letting a person go is something that I haven’t quite figured out, and I usually avoid thinking about it for too long because it has a way of cutting through my thoughts and leaving me with a feeling of impossibility.
But here’s what I’ve found: Not a single person in this world lets go in an instant. You let go once, and then you let go again, and then again and again. You let them go when you’re at a coffee shop and instead of ordering the drink they introduced you to, you try something new. You let them go again when you finally decide to play that song you’ve been avoiding that reminds you of them. You let them go on a night out when you let someone new buy you a drink at the bar (who you maybe go home with afterwards), or you let them go every year on their birthday when you decide not to send them that “Happy Birthday” text. Sometimes, you’ll find you have to let someone go in a million different ways, a million different times. You are human and it’s almost never as effortless as choosing to walk away—or be walked away from—and never once turning to look back.
And more than that, letting a person go also means that it’s okay for certain periods in time to still fill you with fondness: who you were to them and who they were to you. I think back to moments with people who are now memories, and how I used to love just watching them exist. To understand how they modelled the world in their brains. But, I’ve also learned that as things are, to be alive is to be impermanent. We’re only brief bodies in this world, and from moment to moment, we change. So, in this way, I’m reminded that we can’t expect our relationships to never change—or sometimes end.
Walking away from things we love before we feel ready is undeniably painful. We want to stay even if every fibre of our being knows we have to leave. To let go. We want to linger a little longer. To find a shorter path or loophole so we can have our cake and eat it too. And when we can’t, that’s when we try to find closure, which is followed by overthinking, and in turn, spiralling.
I think we forget there’s the future. We have an irrepressible element that fails to remember there are good things ahead. Better things. And, just maybe, that’s the most important thing to recognize in the midst of transition—that our best moments, our most special connections, aren’t all behind us.
The hard truth is, nobody wants to think of themselves as a ‘work in progress’. We want things to happen immediately: falling in love, falling out, letting go of things we should leave in the past, and moving on to what comes after. We despise the ‘in-betweens’ because those are the times when we’re okay, but not exactly there yet. The stages where we have no evidence of growth, but we suspect that it’s happening.
With these in-between phases, I was once told that moving on and letting somebody go is not always about running forward at full speed, so much as about having one foot on the gas and the other on the brakes; letting go, thus accelerating. That it doesn’t mean you were unsure in your feelings, or a failure, if you get someplace incredible and still feel like maybe a part of yourself is missing once you arrive. The art of letting go also doesn’t mean we have to choose between our hearts and our minds (a battle I’ve faced more than once). Rather, it’s leveraging both by deciding to succumb. It’s letting your mind say, “Maybe they’ll always hold a place in my heart” and your heart responding, “Perhaps, but there is more for me than this”. You can mourn and grow simultaneously.
I think that what I’ve come to realize is that there is no ‘one size fits all’ answer to navigating the in-between stages. And although some relationships are now sealed away in the past, any love that you’ve felt, well, that’s yours to keep, even if the person no longer is. I have to believe that counts for something.
So, when the longing gets to be too heavy to carry, and you start to feel yourself questioning your choices, and you’re thinking of turning around, remember this: It’s alright to miss them. It’s alright to dream of a universe where things could have worked out. And it’s alright to keep walking.