the most fun a girl can have is accepting the past and moving forward
reflections on love, closure, and healing from heartbreak
The way I loved you
I will not be embarrassed of that
Just should’ve known when to quit
— “There It Goes”, Maisie Peters
In a few days, it’ll officially be seven months since I ended my first adult long-term relationship. My first serious relationship at all, really. Collectively, the endeavor lasted two years, but under the label of a relationship, it had almost been a year. We were long distance and it was really difficult to maintain for a number of reasons, especially toward the end. As a chronic overthinker and debrief enthusiast, I have my theories on why he behaved the way he did in the relationship—it feels like I come up with a new one almost everyday—but I think that the answer ultimately lies in something much deeper-rooted; something that actually has nothing to do with me and everything to do with him, and the way he chooses to confront his issues. It just got to a point where it began to seep into every aspect of his life, moving much too fast for him to stop it, if he’d even tried. I’d tried to help him, but there was just no way I could do it alone whole also keeping an eye on my own well-being. I couldn’t hold the fort for the both of us on my own. There are a lot of details I’m leaving out, but the story always ends the same: with us parting ways, and it being for the best. I was aware of this fact at the time, although I didn’t fully understand it. I think I do now.
Every other romantic situation I’d been in involved with before this, had ended without any sense of closure—at least on my end. Having to be the one to end it was new. It wasn’t easy, and I didn’t want to, but I knew that I had to, unless I was willing to put my dignity and character through any more risk.
I’m used to cliffhangers and open-ends. They have always been enforced upon me. I never got to choose how it ended, always left with an ever-present wondering of What Did I Do Wrong? The past loves in my life have all been abandoned as mysteries delegated to me to spend an indefinite amount of time to solve. It was only within the last several months that I realized that closure can only really be given to you by yourself, because if you sit around waiting for them to apologize or initiate making amends, chances are, you’ll end up waiting forever. You don’t always have to wait for a sign from them that it’s over. You can put the signs up, too, you know. A lot of us don’t realize we hold this power.
Including myself: from the ages of seventeen to twenty, I had been hanging around, purposefully making myself just the right amount of available so that my past flames had the opportunity to apologize, had the urge ever arisen. It never did, clearly, because I am twenty-three now and most of them haven’t uttered a single word to me since the last time we spoke, which was when our paths diverged. It took me until I was seventy-five percent through my twenty-second year of life to realize that a story can never truly be over unless you decide it is. I just wish I’d known that before, because it would’ve saved me a lot of heartache.
I’ve been thinking about love, and how it’s not fair that we don’t always get to stay with the people we love, and how it’s even less fair when the people we love fall out of love with us before we do. We find ourselves lost in a maze of unanswered questions, wondering where we went wrong, what we could have done differently. The end is a bitter pill to swallow; when you’re left with a void that, in the moment, seems impossible to fill.
Love is a capricious guest, waltzing into our lives uninvited, rearranging our hearts to make room for its presence. It settles in, sprawls itself across the furniture, and you find yourself willingly adapting to its every whim. It settles in. It becomes a natural reflex, a part of your everyday routine, and you begin to believe that it will stay forever. You can’t imagine a future that does not involve love—this one, at least. But as it does, time passes, and you can sense the shift; feel the unease begin to creep in. You can feel it pulling away, but you cling to it desperately, hoping you could be enough to make it stay. We make reckless promises, offer pieces of ourselves we never thought we’d give, all in an attempt to convince love to remain. But love is a force, and when it wants to leave, we cannot change its mind. It had made up its mind long ago—you just didn’t know it yet.
I’ve been thinking about love, and how sometimes we are forced to let it go despite not being ready to. I’ve been thinking about love, and how I can embody love itself, and be the one who leaves. At the moment, it was not something I wanted to do, but knew that it was necessary.
I’ve been thinking about love and how deeply entrenched and engulfed I become when I am in it. Last spring, I wrote of love with such optimism, and such hope:
The feeling ebbs and flows inside of me as I realize how fluent you’ve become in my language in so little time — a language that many have tried and given up, or simply failed to understand — and I’m starting to think that maybe love does not have to be complicated and messy and interesting like everyone makes it out to be. Maybe it can be simple. Maybe it can be easy.
I wasn’t lying through my teeth when I wrote this. I meant every word. I might not feel this way anymore, but that doesn’t negate or invalidate the way I felt when I was fully immersed in it. After this endeavor ended, my immediate reaction was overwhelming sadness, but then I went straight to anger. Of course, the range of emotions I feel post-breakup are much more detailed and nuanced than that, but I’ve noticed that those are the two most prevalent after something ends. My automatic response during these moments are looking at the entire thing as a waste of my time and energy, as a huge mistake, and having the blaring question echo around in my brain: how could I have been so stupid?
Once I’m able to look at it from an angle that doesn’t involve being directly in its midst, it’s so easy for me to resort to bitterness; to blame them for letting me make a fool of myself; to villainize a situation once I’ve removed myself from it. But a love ultimately falling through doesn’t immediately negate the love that was felt for each other at one point in time. It doesn’t make the love any less genuine or real in those moments that I felt it. The plain fact of something ending implies that it once began, and once was.
I also have developed a weird way of looking at the passage of time after a breakup. I know that it’s ultimately healthier to feel it all now as opposed to later, but I’ve gotten good at feeling guilty over dwelling on it. At the three month mark, I was feeling pretty idiotic for still being upset over the whole situation, but my friends all told me that three months was still really fresh, and that it was okay to still feel affected by it.
I tried convincing myself of that sentiment on its own, but the way I was actually able to get myself to feel better about it was comparing the time that had passed between the relationship ending and the present to the age of a baby. It helped to imagine that somewhere in the world, on the exact day of the incident, someone gave birth to a baby, and then a number of months passed—let’s use three as an example. If this mother is having a conversation and says something like, “Yeah, I just had a baby!” and you reply, “Oh really! Congratulations! When?” and the mother replies, “Three months ago!” it is completely normal to feel like this baby is still new. They are still considered a fresh arrival into the world. And it will continue to be like this until the baby is about a year old, sometimes even two. So, with my logic, it’s okay to still be reeling from a breakup after three months, because if you would consider a three-month-old baby as new, so is your three-month-old heartbreak.
Alternatively, if you were in conversation with this very same mother and she mentions just having a baby, whips out her most recent video, and you see a toddler walking and talking, you would maybe question her rationality a little bit. The kid is three years old. Still a baby, yes, but not exactly a new arrival anymore. It’s strange to keep referring to the child as a baby that you just had. The logic applies to breakups, too: it’s a little weird to say “I just got out of a relationship!” when the reality is that it ended three or more years ago. Mine ended about seven months ago, so if the time that has passed was a baby, they’d be getting introduced to solid foods, crawling, and even learning how to stand by now. Not exactly a newborn, but still a young infant. My situation is not exactly fresh, but I don’t think it’s completely irrelevant yet, either. It’s still something I am healing from the effects of, but I think I’m making pretty good progress.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s possible to be thankful for someone and the experience they gave you, and still acknowledge the love that was there, without also wanting to go back to it. It’s okay not to want to go back to it. You don’t have to feel guilty for that. It’s more important that you recognize the significance of having gone through it; the things that it taught you.
Because love no longer lives here, but there was a time when it did. And man, was it good while it lasted.
Just yesterday I was listening to the songs he introduced me to, and I realized I didn’t know who he was anymore, I didn’t know if he still liked those songs. Nature is indeed healing.
Such a beautiful piece, can’t wait to read more from you ❤️
Reading this as a very nostalgic person in the most melodramatic way did something to me, this is so touching and beautifully written, enjoyed every part of it<3