Good Luck With Everything

Maybe that's what hurt most. Not that I wanted him back. I didn't.

Not that I was secretly hoping for some grand reconciliation. I wasn't.

I think I was grieving something much simpler: The realization that a person can share years of your life, once be the center of your plans, and eventually look at you like you're just another unfinished piece of paperwork.

The two years of long distance. The almost four years of marriage. 

The waiting, the believing, the building, the imagining.

They mattered to me. And maybe they don't carry the same weight for him anymore.

That hurts. 

But his indifference doesn't get to rewrite my memories, and his silence doesn't get to decide what those years were worth.

I don't need him to validate the life I lived with him. 

I just needed to finally understand that whatever meaning those years had, I have to carry it myself now.

And maybe that's the real ending. Not falling out of love. Not finding closure.

Just accepting that I cannot keep looking for tenderness in a place that has already gone cold.

So yes, I cried. Because it mattered.

And then I wiped my face, drank my coffee, ate my pastry, and kept going.

Because it mattered.

But it doesn't get to own me anymore.