He was meant to go. He was meant to disappear. The world wasn’t hurting you, the world was helping you.

That man was bait, a pleasure and distraction.

He was not even of your choosing. The two of you together was his idea. He came to you. He had the fantasy. He lured you in and begged.

And now you know that it’s not enough to be admired. Now you know you must admire a person before diving in and falling fast, too.

You want to look up for once and say he’s it. You want to have some skin in the game. You think there’s something special about chasing someone just a little, about going after what you want, about not being passive toward what captivates you.

You’re determined now. You’re determined to not let yourself be persuaded by promising talk and romance, by adventure and plans and future thinking anymore. When you fall in love again, you are going to fall in love with who that person is today, with what your relationship
gives you today, with how it has you feeling today. You pledge to this.

You know that what you can give is different now. It is greater. You know that you will love with more perspective and strength, with more certainty and still plenty of wonder. Perhaps most importantly, you will be discerning. The days of betraying yourself are over.

Life has tested you enough.

When he came into your world that was life challenging you, testing you, seeing whether you’d fall back on old habits again. That was the point of his being in your life right now.

Life didn’t put that man in front of you to see if you were ready for him. Life put that man in front of you to see if you were ready to overturn your tendencies toward illusion and smallness, to see if you were willing to summon up the courage to stand, for once, on your own.

Him disappearing was not a personal offense, that was the world taking him back, that was the world clearing your path.

He had to be swept away, he had to be eliminated.

He is gone, and that is a gift.

It means you’ve begun to live in new ways. His absence is freeing you.

You will remind yourself of this blessing, that you are not a victim who has been wronged by love but rather you are a person who is being looked out for, who has been thrown down because there was a bullet on its way. That’s right, you stumbled over love and dodged a bullet.

Because of this you’ve wound up only bruised. Celebrate this.Say thank you. Thank the world for looking out for you, for leading you down this wild and winding path. And while you are not always certain of what you are after or the many whys of the world, you know you can still trust
the world.

Say I trust you.

You trust that your freedom is your responsibility and you believe that freedom is coming to trust the state of things, including the shelf life of an affair.

You know that your beauty and the world’s beauty is held in everything you believe, and ever since he has left you you have begun to believe that where you end up is where you always intended to be.

I love this about you.