anyway, don't be a stranger
on falling out and letting people leave your life as easily as they walked into it
Now we’re in the yard, gonna plant a tree
Shower it with love until it dies eventually
– “Meclizine”, Harrison Whitford
I’ve been thinking a lot about loving and leaving, and the extent to which the old, overused adage is true: if you love something, let it go. I’ve been realizing, slowly over time, that all relationships, regardless of the category they fall into, serve their purpose until they don’t. It’s one of life’s saddest, most bittersweet truths.
I’ve always had a tendency to hold onto people longer than I should, purely because of how many years there are between us. But it often slips my mind; the fact that people change people, and even more so, time changes people—so really, neither of us are the same people we were when we first met, are we? The versions of us that we were before might’ve needed each other, but the versions we now inhabit may not. I think we’re all just collections of previous selves, each version containing traces of who we used to be, but fundamentally changed by every encounter, every tragedy, and every moment of joy. The people we choose to love leave their marks on us and change us, until we wake up one day and realize we don’t recognize the voices we’re speaking with, at least not fully.