Be thankful

The hardest thing you will have to do in life is to let go of the people you may want to hold onto. Sometimes you will have to settle for living with someone from a distance and that is okay.

It is okay. You cannot show up for another human being the way you need to be loved right now. If circumstances or space or the messiness of life is getting in the way of giving your whole self and nothing less than that to another human being, then you have to be honest. Do not suffocate your love. Do not ignore the way someone makes you feel about yourself in order to keep them in your life, do not ask for something to be more than it can be right now. Instead, appreciate it for what it was, appreciate the lessons it grew within you, appreciate the beauty you were able to feel, and appreciate the fact that in those ways, in those memories, it will be yours forever.

If you are trying to forget someone who was once a beautiful part of your life, the answer is you don’t. You don’t try to sanitize your experience, you don’t try to cut the pain from the bone. You don’t downplay it. You don’t try to hide it away or swipe it under the rug.

Letting go of someone you thought would be in your life forever is difficult. Sometimes, no matter how much love is there, you have to lay it down. You have to walk away. You have to accept that sometimes you get too big for it or you want different things or you cannot pour yourself out for it any longer. And that is okay.

If you were lucky enough to find someone who cared for you, who saw you, who heard all the horrible and haunted things you did in your life and still loved you harder, still thought it all shone like gold that is special. You should not forget that. You should be thankful for it. Be thankful that you got to feel that way about someone. Be thankful for all the mornings and all the nights you got to wrap your limbs within theirs. Be thankful for the way they challenged you and calmed you and made you believe in the person you were becoming. Be thankful for the fact that they saw you in ways you didn’t see yourself. Be thankful for the fact that you risked for love, that you unhinged your rib cage, and opened yourself up in a world that sometimes favors playing it cool over leaping towards connection. Be thankful that you found this person in a world of billions and for a moment in time, even if it was fleeting, you got to dive into the soul of them.

Just be thankful and walk away with grace. Walk away with gratitude. Walk away knowing that you felt something that you experienced something, a lot of people haven’t and in that way, you were changed. Love is not meant to be possessed. It is meant to be felt. Be proud of yourself for feeling so deeply, appreciate it for what it was, and let that life go off into the world and change others the way it changed you.