The fracture left by his absence didn’t vanish; it just stopped bleeding, and I can now hold what we had with tenderness– admiration for the depth of our love.
I suppose the moment I never thought would come has arrived–subtly, and unannounced. The heart, once clenched around a name, the pang of hearing his, begins to soften. In this softness, something stirs–the recognition that loving someone and being in love with someone are not the same. There was a time I didn’t know the difference between them. The lines were blurred, or maybe I didn’t want to draw them. I loved him. I still do, but the way I love now doesn’t ache the way it used to–no longer clutching, begging to be seen. My heart, once sealed around what we had, has begun to breathe, like air circulating within the tomb. The love which I now hold no longer burns a hole through my chest, my ribs feeling as if they could shatter under the weight of this bereavement–the loss of someone, something in which I poured every ounce of my being.
Finally, my heart rests, like an old song I will never forget the lyrics to, but one that is no longer stuck. The memories live quietly inside me, and dare I say I’m leaning towards the belief that the external force of life, which could no longer support our partnership, intervened for a reason. Maybe I meant was for more, maybe I just needed my heart to break so that the light could flood in, the open windows circulating a warm air through my once stagnant being.
The saying “if you love someone, let them go” echoed in my mind while I tried to make sense of “Why?? How could something good just end? I want to hold on, I can’t live without him…”
And when it shattered, I was left directionless on the floor, seeing only the jagged edges, sharp truths dressed as promises. I thought I had been left with only pieces, and I sat with them crumbling between my fingers, cutting my delicate hands on the sharpness of the memory of us.
But soon enough, I began to distance myself from the anguish, and slowly, then all at once, the memories I held transformed. I resisted the notion that time heals, knowing that soon enough, it would, for the simple fact that I could make myself forget–but there was so much beauty I was afraid of removing. I was afraid of wasting energy sanding down the etches he’d made in my heart so they were no longer visible. I feared my capacity for love becoming shallow, even firmer, more unyielding than before.
Somewhere along the line, my despondent self finished her tantrum, and I began to develop an awareness of the truth that time does heal. Now I can see that infinite love does exist, not in its permanence, but in its permeance—
like water: fluid, adaptive, alive.
To love someone means not to possess, nor to remain tethered to an imagined future. To love is to carry the imprint they left as a brush stroke in the landscape of our human experience. The healing I find is not in forgetting, it is in remembering differently—the slow, sacred act of gathering each fragment and learning how to hold them gently in my palms without bleeding. I look down at them with admiration, a gentle reminiscence of the depth our love held.
The place he once filled within me is not empty, but evolving, flooded now with my own breath, my own becoming. We heal not by erasing love, but in the expansion of it. We make space for what was, for what is, and for what still may come.
Because love does not end, it’s simply subject to change, and so are we…
Isabella Elena 