the art of separation

if you had to trace it down to one single thing, it would be this toxic trait both of you had. isolating yourselves. you both had this habit of withdrawing at the slightest inconvenience. when you were hurt, isolating yourself felt like a healing process for one, but it was damaging for the other. and the sad thing is that both of you healed in exactly the same way. and both of you hurt each other in exactly the same way.

you see, this is what happens when you isolate yourself. you don’t confront things. you choose silence and go numb. and when it happens for the first time, it’s only for a few hours. you’re hurt over something, so you choose to focus on something else. maybe you need some time to yourself. maybe you don’t want to talk about what happened just yet. but for all those hours, the other person is waiting on you, trying to reach out, wondering what’s wrong, hoping you’ll come back and talk to them. that’s the first phase of unavailability. and the intention doesn’t matter much when someone ends up getting hurt, whether it’s one of you or both. but you love each other so much that not talking to them for much longer starts killing you. eventually, you sort things out. you talk again, and things go back to normal. you think you’ve gotten through it.

then comes the second phase. this time, you go cold on each other for a day at most. it feels like the longest you could physically and emotionally take at that moment. you still can’t imagine going much longer without talking to them. but every time you do this, you’re learning something without realizing it. you’re learning how to distance yourself. and this time, you’re the one distancing them. they keep reaching out to you, but maybe you’ve turned off your phone. maybe you’ve fallen asleep and decided to deal with everything in the morning. except they’re still waiting on you. all night, perhaps. maybe they don’t sleep at all. and you don’t see what those hours of waiting are doing to them, just as they don’t see what you’re going through when you withdraw. both of you are hurting in your own ways, and both of you think you’re just trying to get through it. it doesn’t happen overnight. it happens over months, over years, slowly enough that neither of you notices the change.

now the threshold of living a life without each other has increased to about a day. you don’t realize it then. both of you feel like you couldn’t physically live without each other for more than a day. you still love each other. you still miss each other. you still come back. so you assume nothing has really changed. but something has. then three days. then a week. then a month. and even though you love each other so much, even though you miss each other more than you know how to explain, you’ve somehow trained yourselves to live without each other. not because you wanted to, and not because the love wasn’t there, but because, little by little, you learned that the absence was something you could survive. what started as a healing process was slowly becoming the art of separation. every silence made the next one a little easier to endure. every time you came back, you thought you had found your way to each other again, without realizing that a part of you had already learned how to stay away. you come back for the first time, and then for one last time.

when the healing process of both of you is isolation over inconveniences, you’re training each other for the art of separation.