Time To Let Go

This originally appeared on my desktop, and then lived there for quite awhile. After little to no editing, but then a whole re-write, followed by a scrapping of the re-write, it was decided that I'm gonna talk about feelings and shit. This is totally a love(broken) story, but also a farewell. Deal with it.

So here we are.

I met this guy. He was suspiciously terrific: tall, terribly handsome, smart, disarmingly funny, a cook, blond and blue-eyed in that Scandinavian way I find irresistible, and a fantastic kisser. I was sort of, kind of, pretty much instantly enamoured.

And you know what? The surface level stuff doesn't even really matter. That's not the kind of stuff that leads you to write nearly 2000 words revealing vulnerable things about yourself; things people could easily use against you or criticize you for, but I'm just trying to paint a picture here. What matters is that this guy made me feel something. I had met a guy who very quickly and unexpectedly stirred up the best in me. He made me feel an easy happiness that doesn't seem common. He was effortlessly and ridiculously funny and in a way that I think only really intelligent people can be. He didn't know this, but it wasn't until I met him that I began to write again, and it’s no coincidence that some of the words I use might sound like something he would say. But then also, there was the way he would look at me. There was something about it that was different, I remember telling my good friend one day. And in quiet moments, moments without any words, he'd look directly at me and it made me feel as though he saw me for everything and all that I am, and liked me anyways.

I'd like to think I’m a pretty good egg, and I think he thought so too, because he said so. When I would look at him, he’d look at me with the biggest smile on his face, and it made me feel a new kind of happy. Early on I made jokes about demanding peeled grapes because it was the most tedious thing I could think of to ask someone who cooks for a living, and when he made me dinner for the first time, he made pan-seared salmon with sauce Veronique- a sauce made with peeled grapes. He once sang me every part of Asia’s “Heat of the Moment”, with the exception of the chorus, while we were lying on his couch, our faces inches apart. His pillows were super cozy, he had great style, he made me feel understood and at ease and beautiful, and he genuinely made me laugh out loud. Everything was going swimmingly. And then he said it wasn’t going to work out.

I didn't understand, and to be honest I still don't, really. Maybe I just didn't want to let go. Maybe I didn't want to feel wrong. But I remember that what I could feel and what was being said didn't seem to add up. It didn't make sense to me. It felt like something was being left unvoiced, but that I'll never really know.

Not too long after, he was gone. He was sent to serve overseas.

I still remember our first date, our first kiss, and how excited I was to find out he even existed. It made me smile that afterwards he immediately took my hand, and for the rest of the time that we dated, he would always reach for it when we walked somewhere, like on that first night. 

I felt like I had met someone that I had already known for most of my life. Someone rare and unique and who made me feel 100% comfortable being as weird as I truly am, because it felt like he was just as weird in all the same fantastic ways. Someone who completely caught me off guard when I looked at him and he looked at me and kissed me in a way no one had before, and I would think,

"You. Please, somehow, always be a part of my life."

And then faster than I knew what had happened, it was done. He was gone. I knew in the morning I wouldn't be able to find him here anymore. I didn't know if or when I would see him again. I was supposed to move on. 

Letting go is a funny thing. It hurts like hell, and it feels like we are losing a part of ourselves that we don't want to see go. We try to bargain for more time, or try to rationalize ways to avoid actually going through with it. But the harder we try to hold on, the tighter we squeeze- the bigger the mess, the greater the pain. 

If you love something, you're supposed to set it free, but that little saying fails to cover the part where you and that something start writing each other, and then you keep writing each other. Five months go by and you’ve written each other just about every day, sometimes more. All that time, all those oceans, but they never feel far.

You don’t know what it all means. You don’t know what happens when they come home. You do know, if nothing else, that you feel as though you have a good friend for life. And then the night they get back they invite you over, and when you see them and they hug you and you can feel them pull you in, you know. You love them. You always have.

For the next while, things that feel intensely intimate and caring and perfect happen. In the mornings, when you wake up and they are still holding you, their arms still wrapped around you, their fingers still interlaced with yours, their head still resting against your own, and they squeeze your hands, and they hold you closer, and you breathe together- it is everything you want. In the mornings, in the quietness of those first few hours that always feels so much more vulnerable than the rest of the day- there is your heart.

They look at you and you look at them, and again you see the biggest, most genuine smile. Again, you feel that easy happiness.

But then they suddenly become cold and weirdly distant and you feel confused about this switch. In the heat of an argument you tell them, out loud, that you love them, but it doesn't matter because they say they don't feel anything. 

Yet again, you don't understand, but there are no answers to be found. You wish you didn't feel anything too. You wish you could forget. You wish you could forget everything that hurt to be able to remember so well. But it doesn't work that way.

I've always been suspicious that life, or the universe, or whatever powers that be, have always had a way of forcing us to learn certain lessons. Almost as if when we miss them, we are given those same lessons again and again and again and again, until we finally do get it.

He’s being sent away again. He’ll likely be gone by the end of the week. I never stopped liking him. I never stopped thinking about him. I feel compelled to add that he is an absolutely wonderful human being, with the kindness and goodness of a person of great integrity. Someone that even my best friend, Angie, current title-holder of most wonderful person ever, also misses when he is gone. But knowing now that he can’t love me, that he won’t, that he doesn’t; it’s time to let go.

I think part of what hurts so much about letting go is the finality of it. It is an absolute. What was will never be the same, we can never go back, and we will never be able to live out and feel those exact moments again. They are gone, and so is the part of us that existed in them. We can resist that, or we can try to find the grace to feel it for every heart-crushing moment, to cry when we need to, and try to figure out what lesson we can take from it. Because there will always be one. It will usually be in the most gut-wrenching moments that we find out and learn the most about ourselves. We will learn about the insecurities we carry with us, the wounds, the traumas, the parts of ourselves that make us uncomfortable; and how certain situations trigger these, leading our fears to decide our actions, influence our choices, and even choose our words. Feel every bit of that pain because it will teach you how not to run, how not to keep hiding from the parts of yourself that you’re scared of.

Letting someone go hurts because on some level, whether it is by our fault or doing, or completely not, they didn't want you. It means someone took a good look at us and decided for whatever ever reason, that they didn't like us as much as we may have thought. But that's okay. 

Please don’t run. It will be tempting to do so. It will be easier to throw yourself into the arms of someone new, or into the arms of work, or alcohol, or food, or a TV series obsession, but it will only delay or displace the real heartache that comes from losing something you cared deeply for. Something that cannot be replaced. It will only push down the uncomfortable feelings you'd rather not deal with. Take the time to heal. 

Rejection is painful, and yet it is not the end. It doesn’t kill us, it doesn’t mean we are less or not good enough. It just means that we have to learn to pick ourselves back up again. And isn’t that kind of the point? We will love, we will lose, we will heal, and then we’ll have the strength to do it all over again.

With an open heart and an empty stomach, I say to you, I say to me: it's time to let go.

- Natalie Bell feels unusually nervous about posting this. She feels a boatload of other stuff too, but doesn't want to talk about it. Please be kind?