Where Love Heals

I dreamed about you last night.

I can’t remember all of it.

Only the feeling of trying to reach the end of something and waking before I could.

Maybe I was trying to say goodbye.

Maybe some part of me still believed there were words left between us that, if I could only find them, would make losing you hurt differently.

But this morning, I remembered all the reasons I had to let you go.

And my heart was heavy.

Just not in the way it used to be.

For so long, I think I was angry with you for coming into my life and waking up parts of me you were never going to stay long enough to keep.

I was angry that it was you.

Of all the people in this world, why did it have to be someone temporary who taught me that I was never ruined?

Why couldn’t it have been someone who planned to stay?

Someone who would take everything you helped me uncover and love me through the rest of it?

I carried that question for longer than I want to admit.

But I think I understand now.

You were never meant to carry the wounds someone else left behind.

You were only meant to show me they didn’t have to belong to me forever.

There were parts of myself I had kept guarded for years.
Parts of my body I had taught myself to protect.

Tenderness frightened me.
Being touched frightened me.

Letting someone close enough to see all the places I had learned to hide felt impossible.

And then there was you.

From the beginning, there was something between us neither of us knew how to explain.

We tried to ignore it.

We tried to be sensible.

And eventually, we stopped trying.

I let you close.

And somehow, I wasn’t afraid.

I don’t regret that for one second.

Because you didn’t save me.

You reminded me that there was still someone inside me who wanted to live without being afraid of everything that once hurt her.

And look at her now.

She’s writing again.

Four books.

Four entire worlds that might never have existed if something inside her hadn’t opened.

She’s laughing differently now, too.

Not because she had forgotten how to laugh before you, but because there is a freedom in it now. The kind of freedom most people never realize is a privilege because they have never known what it is like to lose it.

You gave me nothing I didn’t already have.

You just arrived at the moment I was finally ready to find it.

Maybe that was always your place in my story.

Not the man at the end of it.

The man who reminded me there was still a story left to write.

I think that’s why saying goodbye has been so hard.

How do you reduce something like us to a word as small as goodbye?

How do I look at someone who changed the direction of my life and simply say, take care?

Maybe I can’t.

Maybe there will never be a goodbye that feels large enough for what we were.

And maybe I don’t need one.

I loved you.

I love you.

And some quiet part of me may always love you.

But loving you cannot mean waiting for you.

I cannot carry you so far into my future that one day I am standing in a white dress, looking toward the end of an aisle, and some part of me is still wishing the man waiting there were you.

Whoever is waiting for me deserves to be the person I am walking toward.

And I deserve to walk toward him without looking behind me.

So I have to believe he exists.

Somewhere, there is a love I haven’t written about yet.

A love that won’t teach me how to survive its ending.

A love that won’t become another collection of memories I visit when the present feels too quiet.

Maybe somewhere there is someone looking for me, too.

And I want to be brave enough to be found.

I want to write about love without already knowing how the last page ends.

I want to stop making beautiful things out of everything that has broken my heart.

I want to know what it feels like to write about someone that loves me the way I pour my soul into others.

So today, I am releasing you.

Not because you meant nothing.

Because you meant enough.

Enough to change me.

Enough to wake me.

Enough to remind me that my life was still mine.

I am grateful I loved you.

And I am finally ready to find out who I become when I stop waiting for you to come back.

Today, with a heart that is still heavy but finally understands why,

I let you go.

Jacque Michele