Read This The Day They Walk Away From You Forever

That’s it. It’s over. A turn of the door, a lock of the key, the soft sound of something shutting and the quiet footsteps that follow it. They’re gone. They’re gone and they’re never coming back. You look around at an empty apartment. The kind of apartment you had always thought would belong to you both rather than just you and you see the empty spaces. The place where she kept her favourite books, the emptiness where his guitar used to be, that slapstick bit of a paintjob done during a drunken night, when you both realised your landlord was going to kill you for partially destroying that part of the wall.

All of those are just memories now. A place in your mind where you felt the greatest of emotions. Highs and lows and the points where you looked at each other and thought, “This is it. This is forever. This is never going to change. We are the thing that others aspire to be. We have something no one would ever give up on.”

Do you remember standing there? At the precipice of forever and knowing, just knowing it was going to last forever? After all the tired hopes and dreams. After all the broken down stories. This, this was who you had been waiting for all along, and this would never go wrong.

Except one day it happened. Someone began to lose hope whilst the other sensed it. Someone began to distance themselves whilst the other watched helplessly from the corner, wishing, wanting, praying for them to return. And once day, it just happened. For no reason, no fault, no quandary, forever fell away into a deathly quiet as one of you packed everything you owned and left the apartment you called yours.

For the one of you that is still in love. For the one of you who is left with the heartache, the memories, the goodbyes, this is for you: You did nothing wrong. There is absolutely no fault, no defect, no problem in your love, There is no damage in the very bones of what made your love whole.

This was not your fault. This was no one’s fault. The universe just never intended it to be. And one day, when you finally meet the person you are meant to spend your life with, you will understand why, but for right now, please, do not blame yourself. Don’t look at all the things you have done wrong and things, “My God, why has this happened to me, why did I lose the one person I loved most in the world. How could this be?”

Darling, in all that chaos that has become your mind and your heart and your soul, remember there was a before them. Remember that before their hurricane of love overtook your life, you were an individual getting on with your life. And I know that standing in the aftermath of a quiet apartment, in the aftermath of a typhoon gone wrong, it seems like you will never ever get there again, but you will.

Slowly, you will pick up the shattered pieces on the floor. Slowly, you will fill the empty places they left within the apartment with things that YOU love and maybe one day, maybe one day they will come back and ask to be let into the space they left behind. On that day, darling, I want you to look them in the eye, and tell them you have filled yourself up with so much happiness, so much joy, so much self contentment, that there is no place left for them anymore.

You are complete. With them, without them, never having had them. You are complete.

Nikita Gill is a poet and the author of the book Your Soul Is A River.

Your Soul Is A River is available as a physical and electronic book. You can buy it here.