Postscript (PS, I Love You #2)

by Cecelia Ahern

“Memories can be very powerful. They can be the most blissful escape, and place to explore, because they summoned him again for me. But beware, they can be a prison too.

We all have something that unexpectedly derails us when we are motoring smoothly, blissfully, ardently. This encounter with the club is mine. And it hurts. My instinct is to move inward, recoil, curl in a ball like a hedgehog, but never hide or run. Problems are excellent hunters with their flaring nostrils and sharp teeth; their special sensory organs ensure there is no place they can’t find you. They like nothing more than to be in control, on top, predator to you the prey. Hiding from them gives them power, even feeds their strength. A face-to-face meeting is what is required, but on your own terms, in your own territory. I go to the place where I process and acknowledge what is happening. I ask for help; I ask it of myself. I know the only person who can ultimately cure me is me. It’s in our nature. My troubled mind calls out to my roots to dig deep and steady myself.

The beauty and challenge of long-term relationships is that you change and shift at different times in different directions, side by side under the same roof. Most often, these changes are subtle and you’re subconsciously adapting all the time to the constant but gentle shifting of another human being that you’re so connected to; like two shape-shifters battling to coincide, for better or worse. Remain who you are while they alter, or change with them. Inspire them to go in another direction, gently push, pull, mold, tear at, nurture. Wait.

Perhaps it is not death that angers or scares us, it’s the fact that we have no control over it. Life cannot just be taken away from us without our consent. Given time, and our permission having been granted, we would accept our fate and plot our own timely deaths. But we can’t.

We want to control our deaths, our goodbye to the world, and if we can’t control it, we can at least control how we leave it behind.

Death is always with us, our constant companion, in partnership with life, watching us from the sidelines. While we are living, we are also dying; every second spent living is a second closer to the end of our days. The balance inevitably tips. Death is there at our fingertips all the time and we choose not to go to it and it chooses not to take us. Death doesn’t push us; death catches us when we fall.

I hate goodbyes, but hating them is never a justification to stay.

I’ve come to believe that at different times of our lives we are drawn to certain people for various reasons, mainly because that version of ourselves is connected to that version of them at that particular time. If you stick at it, work at it, you can grow in different directions together. Sometimes you get pulled apart, but I believe there is the right person, the one, for all the different versions of yourself.

To look back, to go back, is not to be weak. It is not to reopen wounds. It takes strength, it takes courage. It takes a person who is more in control of who they are to cast a discerning, non-judgmental eye over who they once were.

I must stop feeling so deeply but I must not be numb; I must move on but I must not forget; I must be happy but not reject sadness; I must embrace but not cling; I must deal with but not dwell on; I must confront but not attack; I must eliminate but not annihilate; I must be gentle with myself but I must be strong.

ultimately, it’s all anyone wants. Not to get lost, or left behind, not to be forgotten, to always be a part of the moments they know they’ll miss. To leave their stamp. To be remembered.