Butterflies and Hurricanes

You know what I’m beginning to think is a load of poppycock?

When people say they are friends with their exes. Sure, it may actually happen in those rare, miraculous cases where everything in both people’s lives is hunky dory, but more often than not, it doesn’t. When you have bared your souls to each other, when you have sobbed hysterically into each other’s arms in all its raw ugliness, when you have seen every mole hidden in every crevice in each other’s bodies, you’ll need to accept the fact that you can never saunter back to the “friends” territory. The strangers-to-acquaintances-to-friends-to-lovers trajectory is one-way.

Here’s the thing. If and when you do attempt to salvage the friendship and go back to that happy, innocent phase before you got into a relationship, you keep looking beyond the friend in them, and keep searching for the person who made you swell up with happiness and showered your life with meaning. On some occasions, if everything works well, (and if it’s a ‘90s movie), a couple may get back together. But in most cases, they’d rather not, since something obviously hadn’t worked out between them in the past.

So, now your relationship is going through a sort of an identity crisis, and you are confused and your emotions are all mixed up and you keep debating with yourself whether this weird relationship, masquerading as friendship, is even worth it. Because let’s be honest with ourselves. We mean well, and we still care about them, and may still be in love with them on some level. But what we need to ask ourselves is this: can we say with absolute certainty, that we genuinely care about them and their well-being without any expectations, whatsoever? Are we hoping for something to happen? Are we waiting for that dying ember to turn into a forest fire again? Because if we are, we need to stop.

What’s happening is this. You are not letting go of what they used to mean to you, and how they made you feel. You both are probably very different people, since you both fell in love, and since you both fell apart. What we are holding on to, are nothing but hollow shells of old dreams and memories. They are phantoms. They are not real. It’s like being in love with a character in a book. And the longer we hold on to them, the more it is going to hurt.

So if you are someone who just can’t seem to get past someone, because that ray of hope, however small it is, is still shining somewhere in the dark expanse of your loneliness, I’d say this to you:

Let it go. Accept the fact that they are not a significant part of your life anymore, but you still wish them well. Even though it may hurt you to see them happy somewhere else and with someone else, even though it may make you cry into your pillow at night, suck it up. Life can hit you hard. It can knock out your breath for a while, but you can get through this. Wear your beautiful smile to work the next day. You are both wiser, stronger, better people than you used to be. Stop hoping, stop remembering, stop comparing and stop expecting. If you can still carry a conversation with them without crying, without sighing, without reminiscing and without expecting anything at all, by all means, please let them stay in your life. But if you cannot, you know what to do. The day you learn how to do this, you will achieve inner peace, and feel a hundred times lighter. There’s a lot of awesome stuff out there, waiting to be explored.

And if you can’t, well, there’s always pizza.