Read This If You’re Up Late At Night Feeling Lonely

It’s June, and the fan is blowing a steady, cool breeze, just enough to keep me from combusting. It’s September, and the leaves have just started to change from the forest green color the summer made me accustomed to into shades of red, orange, and yellow. It’s February, and the bitter cold and snowy skies remind me of a dark time that seems like ages ago. It’s April, and the dreary Monday clouds don’t appear to be vanishing anytime soon. It’s the middle of the night, time has gone by, and I’m still thinking of you.

What is the appropriate time to grieve a lost relationship? Some would say a month. Many would say you get half the amount of time you dated to mourn. Others would say a year in order to experience everything once without them. Me? I say forever, as depressing as that may sound. But in actuality, it should be liberating to you; your loss, whatever loss it may be, knows no timetable. The idea that you can completely distance someone you were once so close to, that you can create a force field around your mind that blocks them out forever, that somehow it is possible to keep your path completely separate from theirs is a fallacy. News flash: it’s not going to happen, which is why, even after all this time, despite my exhaustion from a 40 hour work week and my desperate plea to my brain to take a break for the night, I am awake. You cross my mind, and me being me, decides writing is the best way to purge all these emotions.

It’s hard to understand something when you aren’t given all the facts or when you’re given half-truths that add up to a million intangible paths that ultimately mean nothing. Unfortunately, this nothingness is ever-present with heartbreak. Most of the time we’re too blinded by love to see the glaringly obvious problems. We think it’s necessary to accept all aspects of our partners because that is what you do in a relationship. You push things under the rug and ignore the red flags because you want so badly for this to work. You force something that should have ended months before.

I cannot give you some quick fix or a surefire solution to stop the thoughts. I can’t tell you to write it out or push it from your mind or embrace it or go break something. All I can tell you with certainty is that you are not the only one awake right now, nor will you ever be.

All across the world, there is someone just like you, laying in bed, tossing and turning, pleading for the salvation from their thoughts that sleep brings. I think that’s the biggest problem when it comes to subjects like this. We think we are so alone, when in actuality we have a support network far greater than we ever realize. So whether I know you or not, whatever your gender, age, race, sexuality, I do not care—in case you think no else is awake, I am.