Your heart shattered to a million pieces. You reached the end of your rope. You were faced with the bitter reality that, although you put up a good fight, you’ve lost. You now see that it is inevitable: you need to move on.

You are at a crossroads. You feel like a lost puppy. For how could you not? He was your compass, your GPS, your guiding star.

He led the way and you blindly followed. And now that he’s gone, you don’t know where to go.

You pick up that phone but you remember you have no one to send that text message to. The deafening silence of your phone kills you. All of the sudden you’re free on weekends, but you’ve got no one to spend your time with.

Yet you know, at the back of your mind, somewhere there when you’re not being stubborn, that this is your do-over. This, no matter how much it does not make sense at the moment, is your clean-slate beginning. This is your turning-over-a-new-leaf moment. You know, this is God at work, giving you a second chance – to focus on yourself, to chase your dreams, to discover your passion, to find the ‘you’ that you lost.

So you embrace it. You welcome the change. You push on. You fight back. You slowly rise up from the fall. You do not pick up the pieces of what’s already broken. Instead, you leave the pieces untouched and start from scratch. You rebuild yourself, and the life you had before him. You work really hard only to find yourself diving back in, taking the plunge. 

One. More. Time.

What happened to “I’ll never take you back”? To “I will make it on my own” and “I don’t need you in my life”?

How can you forget how good it felt to not worry about anyone else? To finally connect with friends you have not seen in a while? To talk to your best friend for four hours because no one else is going to call anyway? To have all your family and friends join arms to show you how much they love you so you don’t think about the love you lost? To meet new people who make you feel better about yourself for a change, because that relationship made you love yourself less?

Weren’t you enjoying your new-found freedom? Yes you were. You had come a long way, why throw all of it away?

Maybe your progress was not in sync with the timeline you had in mind for moving on. Maybe the frustration of being stuck in the middle of not-hurting-as-much and but-I’m-still-hurting got the better of you.

Maybe it was unbearable being outside of your comfort zone – him.

Maybe. Or maybe you did not give it enough time. Maybe you did not try hard enough. Maybe it was easier to dive back in than to swim away.

Maybe that phone call came to soon – the one you know you shouldn’t have answered. If you hadn’t taken that call, he wouldn’t have had the chance to tell you he missed you and that he still loved you. Then maybe you wouldn’t have been sucked back in. You wouldn’t be back to where you started. Maybe if you stop running back, you wouldn’t come full circle.

Maybe the reason why you couldn’t move on was because, deep inside, you were still holding on. In the depths of your heart you really did not let go.

Maybe you did not really give your heart the chance to heal. Because maybe if you did, just maybe, you’d be happier.