When you let them go

   There is a specific feeling which exists only when you run into someone you had long forgotten. It's probably most palpable when it's an ex, but it can happen with friends who were once particularly close. It is comparable to a scab that seems to have been on your skin for forever--a scrape which was once quite painful but has been so long in the healing process that you no longer notice its presence when you wash over it in the shower. You peel it off almost out of boredom and suddenly there is a drop or two of blood, something that vaguely resembles the wound it once was, now too distant to really cause any discomfort. These people are wounds which have healed over, but haven't quite turned into scars but have become another part of your lived-in body.
    Letting someone go--when it is a necessary act of of self-preservation, something that has to happen if you expect to move forward in life--is regarded as a kind of victory. You have successfully overcome an emotional trauma, that once surrounded you like a kind of fog which prevented you from ever seeing the sun. People will tell you, always with the best intentions, that one day you are going to wake up and realize that you are okay, and your life is not completely over because they are no longer in it. And, this is true. Although it is not the note of positivity that they are quick to label it. Because it is not as though you simply wake up one day and proclaim yourself to be fine, suddenly hearing birds chirp and children laugh after months of only your own oppressive silence. You simply start to forget, feeling the acute pain of the loss less and less as each day goes by. There will come a day when you don't care, but you won't notice because you will have other things to think about.
   But in order to let that pain go, on order to remove this person from the place of power they have occupied for so long, you must let everything go. Perhaps in a very distant future you will be able to pick up and choose the memories you want to keep, but for a very long time, one memory will always bleed into another. You will not be able to simply think about the time the two of you sat on the beach for the entire night, talking about your childhood, drinking the second-least expensive wine you could find in the store. Because when you allow yourself to think about that it will remind you of them as a whole, and it will eventually lead you to remember all the other terrible things that happened after that night--not the least of which being their eventual departure. They exist within us as a whole person, stories with beginnings and endings. But in order to let them go, in the beginning, you cannot pick and choose the things we want to keep for nostalgia sake.
   We have to stop caring what they would think of us if they saw us. Stop worrying about running into them in the store. Stop obsessing over the things we could have done differently to make them stay. And that means letting go of every vestige of who they are to us, proving to ourselves that life can be just as good, just as beautiful, without them in it. When you realize, long after the fact, that you no longer care as you once did for someone--that what they are doing in life has no bearing on you, and vice versa--it feels very much like a small death. Who they were with you no longer exists, and you cannot even preserve it in your memory for the sake of your own mental health.
   I recently ran into someone I used to know very well. I hadn't seen him in close to two years, and I barely recognized him when I crossed him on the sidewalk. I had forgotten that it was his neighborhood, had forgotten that we used to eat at his place, forgotten it all And he looked different, different enough to be slightly unsettling. We exchanged words, but as people who had barely ever known each other. It was a spoken confirmation that things had indeed changed--that we had let one another go, out of necessity--and the parts of ourselves we needed to erase to move on were just going to have to be forgotten. Of course, you never really forget anyone, but you certainly release them. You stop allowing their history to have any meaning for you today. You let them change their haircut, let them move, let them fall in love again. And when you see this person you have to let go. You have to realize there is no reason to be sad. The person you knew exists somewhere, but you are separated by too much time and experience to reach them again.
   We told each other we should get coffee sometime, but didn't exchange our new numbers. We knew we weren't going to see each other again.