This Is Me Letting You Go

by Heidi Priebe

You’ll get over your ex the first time you forget their Mom’s birthday.

i never knew his moms birthday

Some part of you knows better—that you have to wait this out. You have to take it in waves. You know that someday you’ll forget their birthday and they’ll forget yours too and until that day you keep yourself busy.

You’ll get over your ex the first time you receive exciting news, and it doesn’t occur to you to call them.

You’ll get over your ex when you meet someone new. Not when you hook up or shack up or even fall in love with another human being, but the first time you find yourself sitting across a crowded café table from someone whose smile melts you and whose arms you’d fit perfectly into, and yet some part of you is holding back.

You’re not broken or hopeless or loveless just because your heart is aching—you are simply healing yourself. And when you’re done, there will be a whole new world waiting for you.

And in some ways, they’ll never really leave you. The people who change us in those big, irrevocable ways never do.

The ways you now look at the world that would never have occurred to you if they had not opened your eyes up to seeing and doing things differently. We don’t ever lose people we love in their entirety, and perhaps we never should—we become bigger, more encompassing people ourselves because of it.

That pieces of them will live on inside you forever and that discarding them would mean discarding parts of yourself. But the day that you get to move on is the day you simply decide to do so despite it—despite the tired, restless ache that begs you not to take a chance. Despite the fearful, self-conscious mind that tells you nobody will ever love you better. Despite every careless part of you that wants to keep holding on but knows that it needs to let go.

That for a while, every date, every relationship, and every person you fall into lust with will continuously be held to the impossible standard of the first person who ever made a home inside your heart, and that everyone else will fall short.

That sometimes love will mean choices you don’t want to make and roads you don’t want to take, and that it’s going to be every bit as unglamorous as it is incredible and brave.

Somebody always has to care more.

You’re going to be loved by someone who you just kind of like.

Being the one who cares less makes us feel cool and suave. But never anything more than that. It can’t even begin to compare with the excitement of meeting someone you are CRAZY about.

Because the last thing this world needs is one more indifferent person. If you’re the only one left with passion, then use it. Use the hell out of it. At the end of your life, go out with a bruised-up, worn-out heart that gave too much love, loved too intensely, and felt too fiercely.

It will always be more honorable to be out in the field getting trampled on than to be on the sidelines feeling superior for never having tried.

If you care less, cut the cord. If you care more, then show it.

Because that is what we need in this world—more people who care. More people who give a shit.

We need more people who care more, regardless of how that makes them look.

I don’t want to be the person you always agree with. I want to be the person you challenge—to change, grow, and expand in ways that never occurred to me before I met you. I want heated debates at 3 a.m. I want stark disagreements when I’m acting out of line. I want passionate arguments about the way we’re living because your fire fuels mine, and I never want that spark to die out. I want to be someone you aren’t afraid to challenge because sometimes I need that extra push. And you can bet your ass that I’ll push you right back.

And I hope that I inspire you, too. That together, we can encourage one another to grow into the fullest, strongest, fiercest versions of each other.

After a certain amount of time, there is a rhythm to falling in love. You meet someone. You fall mercilessly for them. And it works—for a while. You carve out those memories—the ones that seem so unique to just you and that one other person: The way they’d kiss you with firm hands and eyes open.

That someday, this person who lights up your existence may also be the person you abhor—the one you throw from your life and block from your Facebook feed and cringe at the mention of their name.

Will you regret this? Will it come back to haunt you? Four years from now, will you wish that you could travel back to this exact moment in time and put the phone down?

What if you knew that the person you would fall in love with would someday be the utterly wrong person for you but that right now, they are precisely what you need? What if it doesn’t have to last forever? What if that’s not the point at all?

Because maybe the end game is worth it every time. Maybe the heartbreak is a side effect of something so brilliant that it eventually overshadows the destruction. Maybe some things don’t have to last forever in order to change you irrevocably.

It means, “I’ll miss you, but not enough to be with you.” It means, “I love you, but not quite enough to stick around and fight.”

You stop waiting for them to come back by becoming profoundly uncomfortable. You move through the places where you wish they still were, and you hold your own hand as you go.

You feel their absence on a core, guttural level. You absorb it in exactly the way that you’re afraid of. You let it sink under your skin.

There was the one where it was simpler, easier, pure. The one where we wanted the same things, laughed at the same jokes, and loved each other’s families as if they were our own. Where my ambitions didn’t push you out of the picture and where your insipid lack of confidence didn’t tear us apart at the seams.

We live in this one, the one where we lost each other.

This is the Universe where, in ten hundred thousand tiny ways, we were wrong for each other. It’s the one where we’re always going to be.

When we have to walk away before we’re ready. When we have to leave what we want and what we love in the past.

There’s nothing more difficult than walking away from what we love before we’re ready to.

We are creatures of the past and the future—always mourning what we’ve done or gunning fearlessly towards what comes next.

What if you ran outside to meet me, and I versed you brash soliloquies of everything I could never say when we were lying beside one another, too afraid that one wrong word or strange movement could make it all come tumbling down? What if you listened?

What if we started all over again, right there in that driveway?

What if I told you I was sorry?

What if I changed for you? What if you changed for me, too?

What if I never won you back? And what if—as much as we’d hate to admit it—that was the happiest ending of all?

We have all fallen for temporary people.

They come as swiftly as they go from our lives, with their reeling minds and striking bodies and genuine, wide-open hearts. They are hurricanes and madness and wrecking balls; they’re sunshine and blissful surrenders.

We are advised not to fall for these people. And yet we do, knowing full well we can’t keep them. How could we not, after all?

Some people come into our lives for a season, for a reason, for the simple purpose of showing us the world in a way we would never have seen it otherwise.

What else do we do but grow enchanted by the brilliance of their minds, by the purity of their spirits, by the strength and intensity and contrast that they cast into the colorless corners of our lives?

What else do we do but love them with everything we have before they’re gone?

After all, we never know how much time’s left.

This is me knowing that we don’t get a do-over—not on the last night I spent asleep beside you, the last time I told you I loved you, or the first moment I felt us start to drift apart.

This is me knowing we don’t get to go back.

This is my acceptance that I’m going to miss you. That there are going to be nights when I curl up in bed with a novel and a warm mug of tea, and your absence on the left side of the bed is a chasm that swells and envelopes me.

This is the realization that missing you will become a second heartbeat in my body, strong and thrumming inside every place where you lingered and then left. These are my weakened vital signs, beating out of sync with yours for a while.