By Laura Van De Walle
After someone you love walks away from you, all you really have to rely on is time. With time, you start to slowly recover, learning to live life without them.
You adjust, you alter, you avoid — anything that just makes it even the slightest bit easier for you.
Every fragment of progress that you gain feels like a massive accomplishment because you really never thought you’d get this far without them.
People stop asking you if you’re alright or if you miss them. They start asking what the future holds for you and when you’re going to start putting yourself out there again.
The push to move forward is a good one — a healthy one — and we all have to do it eventually. Sometimes it’s nice when people start forgetting what used to be because it helps you forget for a short while, too.
What I really want to know, though, is how long is it acceptable to grieve the loss of this person? This person that you loved with every fiber of your being. This person who was your go to, your partner, your teammate, your best friend.
How long is it acceptable to think about them? Everyone around you moves on, everyone around you assumes you have moved on.
Most days you even feel like you’ve moved on.
Then one day, this feeling of loss buried deep within yourself begins to creep up and wrap itself around you all over again. It slowly tightens its hold on you, until unexpectedly you feel yourself crack under the pressure of it.
Memories of them flood your mind, and your heart aches, willing you to break. You keep telling yourself that you won’t break, that they aren’t worth it, that it doesn’t matter, that you’re over it.
If that was all true, though, why are you huddled on the floor with your arms wrapped tightly around yourself, trying desperately to hold all the pieces together that you’ve worked so hard to put back in place? How is it possible that after this long, he is still capable of bringing you to such low and dark places?
How much longer will you suffer for this?
These questions haunted me, every single time I felt myself bend and break under the pressure of our memories. I wish I knew the answers. I wish I could tell everyone feeling this way that after this exact amount of days, months, or even years that it would all vanish into thin air.
The reality is, though, a broken heart isn’t something that follows a timeline. It’s not something you can force to disappear into a corner in the back of your mind where it never finds its way back to the surface.
Time does not heal all wounds — people do.
One day someone will come along, and while you’re in the middle of picking up a piece of yourself that you accidentally dropped, they will reach down to help you.
They will hold your hand and help you place it exactly where you needed it. They will wrap themselves around your heart and your mind, holding you tightly in place, never letting the pieces fall again.
On that day, you will have the answers to all of your questions. On that day, you will finally heal.
Laura Van De Walle is a student writer and a contributor to Unwritten. She writes primarily on topics of health, self-esteem, and relationships.
This article was originally published at Unwritten. Reprinted with permission from the author.
