Love doesn’t always end with the relationship

The older I became, the less I asked people to stay. Sometime after my twenties, I made myself a promise: I would never watch myself beg again. It did not mean endings hurt less. It meant I learned to conceal the hurt behind composure. Perhaps I lost some of the wide, doe eyed faith I once brought to lovers. Perhaps I became so practiced at surviving love that I missed some of it. So when, in my thirties, someone could still make me shy, give me butterflies or return me to the rage of a teenage girl staring at the ceiling of her parents’ house, I took it as proof that life had not made me unreachable.

I still remember the last time a then boyfriend wanted to end things and all I made out was, “Are you sure?” He paused and then said “I don’t know.” People may hear that question as pleading but by then, I knew exactly how I grieved. Once I accepted an ending, I would not know how to live halfway inside it. I was asking whether he understood what he was setting in motion: that I would dismantle the private world we had built and I would not leave one room lit in case he changed his mind. I would kill the part of me that loved him, that loved us. So I just wanted him to be sure.

People actually do this all the time at the end of relationships or right before the end— my mother always told me that there’s a small window of opportunity for reconciliation no matter how big the fight. Sometimes it can be 3 weeks or 3 months. The timing is a tell in itself. One can also always take it back and say I was incredibly angry at you but I want to be with you. Or one can go about it another way and simply send a song. Some start another fight just to speak again. Some fall back into their daily routine of talking about their days and the thought of a breakup triggers laughter.

My grief has always been a bit clinical when it’s really over. I’ve just gotten really good at killing the parts of me that loved them. I’ll return alone to the restaurants, streets, and cities that once belonged to us so the final memory there becomes mine. I’ll separate songs from car rides, places from hands and the future from the person I had placed inside it. I kill the part of myself that waits, because that is the only way I know how to survive being left. It has worked, mostly. But sometimes, you meet someone, and the part of you that loved them refuses to die.