Where Love Heals

You used to live in my favorites.

Right there at the top.

I never had to look for you.
Never had to scroll.
Never had to wonder how long it had been.

You were just there.

Until today, when I was laughing at something a friend sent me,
sitting in the middle of an ordinary morning,
working on another book, feeling genuinely happy

and for some reason, I went looking for your name.

And I had to scroll.
Then scroll again.
And there it was.

Such a stupid, insignificant thing.

Your name had moved down my screen.

And somehow,
my heart understood
what that meant before I did.

Life had kept happening.

There had been messages and conversations
and laughter and plans and people needing me
and people loving me and
words I had written and mornings
I had survived without even noticing I was surviving them.

Enough life had happened between
you and me that my phone
had quietly moved you down the page.

And God, that hurt.

Because once, you lived in my favorites.
Then you moved to my archives.

And I used to think healing meant that eventually
I would become strong enough to remove you.

I don’t think that anymore.

Maybe some people aren’t meant to be deleted.
Maybe healing isn’t erasing someone.

Maybe healing is being able to find
their name buried beneath a hundred
ordinary conversations and realizing
that while seeing it can still knock the wind out of you
you were breathing just fine before you saw it.

I was laughing before I saw your name.
Do you understand how enormous that is?
I am happy.

Not pretending to be happy.
Not surviving.
Not trying desperately to prove that I had moved on.

I am simply living.
And then there you are.

Or, more accurately, there you weren’t.

No longer the person my
fingers instinctively reach for
when something happens.

And suddenly I wanted to throw up
from the ache of loving someone
who has become history while my
heart still recognizes him in the present tense.

Because I do still love you.

There.

I said it.

I love you.

I don’t need that sentence to mean anything anymore.

It isn’t a request.
It isn’t an invitation.

Maybe some small, impossible part of me always will.

And I have finally stopped
demanding that my heart kill
something just because my life
learned how to live without it.

Maybe that’s what nobody tells you about healing.
Sometimes you don’t stop loving them.

You just stop bleeding every day.
The wound becomes a scar
and most mornings you don’t even think about it.
Until something brushes against it.

A song.
A place.
A memory.
A name buried.

And suddenly your body remembers
a pain your life has already learned to carry.

But then I realized something.

You moved down.
Not because I forced you there.
Not because I finally found enough courage to erase you.

You moved down because life kept arriving.
Message after message.
Person after person.
Day after day.

Life kept placing itself between
the last time we spoke and the woman I am now.

And I didn’t even notice.
Maybe that’s the strangest part of healing.

You spend so long wondering when it
will finally happen that you don’t realize it already has.

Not completely.
Maybe never completely.

But enough.

Enough that I can love you and still laugh.
Enough that I can miss you and still write another book.
Enough that your name can break
my heart for a moment without breaking my life.

And maybe I’ll never delete you permanently
Maybe I don’t have to.

Because today I learned
there is somewhere else a person can go.

Farther and farther down the page,
while I keep moving forward.

Jacque Michele