Splitting Up

I know you don’t/won’t want to hear from me. I like to say and think that I am over you, just not over it. Sometimes I manage to convince myself that that’s the truth, but sometimes I think about it and I realize that ‘you’ and ‘it’ (what happened between us) are intertwined. To be over one, you cannot be hung up over either. ‘You’ are ‘it’, and ‘it’ is ‘you’.

YOU

When we first broke up, I only remembered all the good stuff. The best dates, the first time you (someone ever) asked to hold my hand, the first time we (I) kissed. It was painful knowing I had lost all of that. The firsts that were meant to last and to be the last, and the innocently happy dates we had. You were my first. You were good.

Then you left, and so did all the good stuff in my memory.

IT

Over time, I developed this self-healing mechanism that basically made me forget all the good times and hold on to the bad ones to numb the pain and bitterness of promises broken. Before I knew it, whatever happened between us wasn’t even a beautiful tragedy. It was just a tragedy – a tragedy that never should have happened.

It was a mixture of bad timing and ill fate. It wasn’t one of us or both of us. It was circumstances. Circumstances made us turn against each other and turned us into ugly beings we were not. I told myself we should have known better, we should have known. We weren’t bad people, we were scared and we were young and naïve.

I blamed it for causing all the bad stuff, for making us look bad.

I

But now I think I’m ready to accept everything. I’m ready to acknowledge that you are the sum of the good, the okay, and the bad. I’m ready to tell myself that it’s okay that I’ve lost some because I’ve gained some too.

Your smell cannot be separated from the intimacy that we shared. Your reaction in the circumstances indirectly led to the valuable lessons I’ve learnt from our relationship. Your decision to call it quits cannot be seen as independent of how you deal with tough times. You not explaining what went wrong with us helped me to accept that sometimes in life you fall without initially knowing why and that’s okay.

More importantly, I realized that I had a part to play in all of this. I made it happen by driving you to a corner. My mistakes are part of me and I need to get over that too.

What I’ve only realized is ‘it’ is not ‘you’, but us jumbled up in one huge mess that I have tried to entangle by dealing with them separately without knowing exactly what I’m doing.

Now I will stop trying in vain to separate the heat from the fire. 

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