You Can Finally Let Him Go

You’re going to meet and fall in love with a man who feels like a light in the dark. It will take you years to realize that his light comes from an artificial source, and the only thing that has any potential to grow in his presence is cancer. There will come a day where he will rest his hand on your forehead for a little too long, checking for a fever, but you’ll both know in that exact moment that your feelings for him are something you will never be able to fully sweat out. The truth is, he’s always going to be there, on the back burner of your heart. If you’re not careful, the flames might burn the whole place down.

He’ll run away and hide in the shadows of the waking world, as well as your dreams. Years later, you’ll still be searching the snow banks of your subconscious for his body. You will never find it. Nor will you ever find the answers to the questions that he left you with. You will learn to adjust beneath the weight of the unfinished business between you two. You will get used to the unanswered texts but sporadically send them anyway because you’ve always found comfort in talking to ghosts. You’ll tell yourself that he’s dead, because at this point, he might as well be. You’ll learn that some connections, no matter how rare or intense, aren’t worth the haunting.

One day, you’ll realize that it’s okay to let him go, to stop wasting your energy and strength holding a door open for someone who never even looked back. It’s okay to let go—of him, of the door, of the years wasted standing there waiting for the return of something that might not have even existed in the first place. You’ll realize that you can let go of the hopes you had for a friendship or a future. You can let go of your idea of who you thought he was and who you thought you were to him. You can let go of all the love you had because he didn’t have any for himself or for you. You can forgive yourself for struggling to love yourself because he didn’t know how to. You can stop blaming yourself for what he did, as well as what he didn’t do. You will finally realize that it wasn’t your fault. He left, but he didn’t take the best of you. You didn’t lose a home. In his absence, you simply gained a breeze because you didn’t know how to let the door close behind him. You don’t have to be cold anymore. Shut the door. Home is wherever you are comfortable with yourself. Everyone else can go to hell.

You gave everything you had. You waited longer than you should have. You tried to reach out; you gave him chances he didn’t deserve. You gave him trust he didn’t earn. You wrote so many poems, but you’ll never be able to bleed him all the way out. He’s a part of you now, but that’s okay. You can let him go. He isn’t yours to save.

You love him. He knows. He knows, and now you can finally let him go.