When The Magic Is Gone

One day you will wake up and feel different. You’ll realize the magic is gone. The pining is done.

And that you’re finally able to look back at the past with perfect 20/20 vision, having fortuitously (and fucking finally) crushed your rose-colored glasses sometime in the night.

Who knows when it will be?

Fair warning: that’s almost always unclear.

Sadly, there’s no definitive timetable. No real playbook for this kind of thing.

It probably won’t be as soon as you’d really like or had hoped for, which would’ve been weeks ago, maybe months or in some dire (but certainly far from unprecedented) cases, years — but it’s not up to you.

Which is unfortunate.

However, if you could potentially forget and/or feel better immediately then you’d never learn a goddamn thing, really, would you?

You wipe someone and the memories you made with them away completely and the scars go away too, along with the tissue, return to potentially perfect skin, so then you won’t have anything to show for the fact that you’ve been through the shit.

It’s worth considering that at some point we all have to pay the Piper.

You didn’t think you’d get off scot-free, did you?

That’s not how this works.

You have to do your penance before you feel good enough to go out and sin some more.

Gotta get in some tormented night sweats before some modicum of happiness creeps back in and yearns and demands to see the light of day.

Anyway.

One day you will wake up and feel different. The magic will be gone. The pining will be done.

It’s tough to articulate in detail outside the abstract, but there’ll be an absence that somehow makes you feel more full. Sometime during your slumber the stomach-level sadness that has plagued you almost indefinitely and that you’ve talked or thought about ad nauseam, making you feel sick every morning and more than occasionally throughout the entire evening, will have vanished.

In fact, You’ll maybe have even slept through the entire night — something so out of the norm that you wake up confused, perplexed and almost counterintuitively pissed off that you don’t have another four or five hours to try and catch some sleep and/or indulge in your existential crises after you stumble to the restroom for a quick piss and before your alarm goes off.

You might not initially realize it, but this will be the first morning you don’t instinctually reach over to the empty side of the bed.

Maybe you have even started to shift over ever so slightly to the left, night after night, without realizing it, taking up space that is now and for the foreseeable future there for your taking.

You’ll know it’s empty. You’ll have accepted the emptiness of this space you’ll happily but maybe hesitantly but always hopefully cede to another at some point. That will depend on many variables and sometimes, sadly, insurmountable barriers to their physical and/or emotional entry.

This feeling of something that is almost nothing is probably not one you can aptly describe. Not entirely.

If you think about it, there are words in pretty much every language (probably) for things you do not believe in, and many for what you do, but not a single word that can describe this particular feeling. Not a fully encapsulating one.

Not yet, anyway.

It may feel, in just four words, like this: “The magic is gone.” And/or: “The pining is over.”

Then four more words: “Oh, Thank you god,” you may mutter, even if you don’t believe in one.

Especially when you remember that not all magic is good magic.

One day you will wake up and feel different. The magic will be gone. The pining will be over.

And what’s left to do after that?

Make some more magic.

This article was brought to you by PS I Love You. Relationships Now.