This Is How I Will Let Go Of You

First, I will gather my thoughts. I will involuntarily relive all of our moments together. I will wrap them in silk linens so they do not break; after all, they’ve always been fragile. I will separate them by the way they make me feel and I will put them deep into the closet under my least favorite sweaters. I will shut the closet door, with minor hesitation only because I have no answers, and somehow the naive parts of me think they are held in the memories I might soon forget.

I will shut the door only because I had a minor glimpse of relief when I remembered that I could reopen it at anytime.

Then, I will let the days pass. I will show up for the sunrise and I will be there for the sunset. I will make a commitment to myself that I will never lay in bed alone past noon; I will get up every morning and I won’t ever stop having an appetite for the day. I will learn how to be alone, and I’ll learn how to paint.

I will paint the loss of you on a canvas that I refuse to hang up for display, but I will convince myself that endings are a piece of art.

I will refuse to dismiss connection, but I will never replace you. I will be open to love because it is you who taught me all about worthiness. I will let go of my anger one day, and maybe the week after that I will let go of my sadness. I will seek to replace all of my hostility with grace. I will forgive myself of all of the things I was simply unable to give to you, and I will forgive you for demanding much of me.

To let go of you I will find freedom in the suffocation of my thoughts. I will learn more, I will see more, and I will count my blessings more.

To let you go I will perseverate on excitement, I will not dwell on anything but my cravings for a better future.

After all of this I will move, leaving all of our moments in the closet of a house I will never go in to again. I will leave my loneliness in the room we once shared because I will find comfort in creating a new space for myself.

Lastly, I will open my mind. I will heal in the presence of survival. I will continue to have seldom nights of chaos, I will let myself be a wreck because God knows ships must crash before parts of them learn how to float on their own.

When I finally let you go everything will be silent, all of your noise will have dissipated and I will feel the voice of nothing in the change that will soon bring me everything.

What I will soon understand is that letting you go is only possible when I let the old parts of me I no longer want to know go, too.

This is not all about you, you see. This is the part of my story where I get to direct my own destiny. This is the part of loss that brings us agony but also brings us everything we need to know about the world and who we want to be.

This is not a departure that I will let kill me, this is a departure that I will let create me.