Maybe You’re Not Supposed To Be Over Them Yet

After heartbreak, we want resolution and we want it quickly. This is, of course, understandable. Heartbreak sucks. It’s as painful as it is uncomfortable. It forces us to look at ourselves from many different angles, simultaneously identifying the best and worst parts of ourselves to try and piece together why the other person had to leave, or why they were never there at all. And as we try to pinpoint all the ways we are both not enough and too much, we mostly just wish the pain would stop.

It seems almost cruel that it only takes a heart a second, a conversation, a word, or a glance to break, but it can take weeks, months, or even years to have it recover.

So we try to take shortcuts, to expedite the process. We take the edge off drowning their memory in cheap beer and conversation. We go home with people who aren’t them. We swipe, swipe, swipe. We sleep; we sleep a lot. We numb.

But no matter what we do, the pain still is there, looming, watching, waiting. And honestly, maybe it’s supposed to be this way. Maybe it’s not supposed to be easy to let someone go.

Maybe we’re not supposed to be over them yet because we still have something to learn.

After all, maybe there are answers in the silence, maybe there’s hope in the pain, and maybe, just maybe, there’s love in being alone. At least I’d like to think so. 

Because we never learn who we are more than when no one is around, when the night is turning into dawn and the silence is deafening and the only thing we can feel is the rhythm of our pulse. And it’s in these moments when we begin to come back home to ourselves.

We finally start to learn that it’s okay to have loved so deeply to not have it last or come to anything at all. We learn that we are still worthy of love even though the other person could not love us. We learn that sometimes we are the reason things fall apart and how that merely makes us human and not monsters. And sometimes we realize that there is never a single, simple reason as to why things end; sometimes, they just do.

And that’s okay. 

I don’t have all the answers; in fact, I don’t have most of the answers. And I never will. But I know this: Your pain, your heartbreak, is trying to tell you something. And no matter how much you try and push it away, it’ll always circle back. Let it.

And maybe you’re not ready to hear what it has to say; that’s okay, too. This takes time and one day all of this will make a little more sense. You will never have complete closure, but you will find peace, and it won’t be in someone else’s arms.

It’ll be in your own.