the death of a ship

i don’t think the strange part is that you miss it. of course you do. how could you not? you spent so much time knowing someone that their absence doesn’t suddenly make your mind forget that they existed. the strange part is what you want to do with that feeling. because you’re not necessarily thinking, i want everything back. sometimes it’s much smaller. you just want to know how they’re doing. you wonder what they’re doing, whether they ever think about you, whether they’re okay. maybe you feel guilty, or maybe you still love them. see, they had fit so well in your jigsaw that you wonder if not the whole, why not the fragments of them? can you keep some fragments of them to yourself?

once in a while, you’d be unsure about it. your mind would play games. your heart would yearn. your soul would long. you’d think maybe, just maybe, if they’d come back, it’d all work out. perfect as it was. the best case scenario. but the very person you fell in love with, the person you spent time with, and the person you’ve left behind. all of them and none of them are the same person. you see, it’s an ever-evolving thing.

maybe that’s what we do in weak moments. we negotiate with things we’ve already accepted. we say, i know it’s over, but maybe we don’t have to disappear completely. maybe we can talk. maybe we can check in. maybe we can keep some small version of what we had.

see, if you had to get back with them again, it could only be if you were strangers. you know a little too much about them, but you don’t know them as a whole anymore. you know the version of them that belonged to you, but not necessarily the person they’ve become since. and maybe they don’t know who you’ve become either. so how do you go back to something when the two people who made it no longer exist in the same way? you can’t really return to what you had. you would have to meet again, somehow, as two strangers carrying memories of each other.

see, the evidence says you’d miss them. that’s inevitable. they’d stay on top of your head 24*7, and you can do nothing with the discomfort except embracing it. embracing the discomfort, not really them. you sit with it, you live with it, you breathe it. do you really? the oxygen doesn’t really get in, it gets stuck right on your throat. you have to make an effort to breathe. but the truth is you’d miss them. and miss them bad. there will be peaks and valleys. every time you feel the last one was the maxima, there’d be another. until someday, you reach a global maxima. every tomorrow would be a tougher yesterday. there won’t be a single day when they aren’t on your mind. and then there’d come a day when their thoughts wouldn’t cross your mind. and that’d be the day you’d smile at the feeling of not missing them. you’d get comfortable with the discomfort. and after some more time. no, i’m lying. after a long, long time, there’d be two consecutive days. and hopefully there’d come days where they won’t even occur to you. that’s when you’d start remembering them and not missing them. see, there’d always be a part of us you’d carry until the end. but at no point does missing them give you the authority to go back to the zone of no return.

sometimes i wonder if clementine did it right. was that the right way? a procedure where you could forget someone completely. no missing them, no wondering how they’re doing, no random memories showing up when you least expect them. maybe that would make things easier. but would it really be healing if the only way to stop missing someone was to forget that they ever mattered?

i don’t think the goal is to hate them. i don’t think the goal is to pretend they didn’t matter. some things are worth remembering for the rest of your life. you can cherish something and still let it remain where it ended. you can care about someone and let them live their life without you. you can wonder how they’re doing and decide that you don’t need to know.

see, if something couldn’t survive as what it was, why force it to survive as something else? why reserve a part of yourself for something that you’ve already decided is dead? if you’re going to give yourself to something, give yourself to something that’s alive. not two thirds to something new while keeping one third buried somewhere in the past. not half a friendship because a whole relationship couldn’t survive. maybe something new will grow. maybe it won’t. you wouldn’t know. but it doesn’t need to grow right there.

after the death of a ship, don’t try to grow something on top of its graveyard. walking with the flowers to the grave doesn’t bring the dead back. don’t.