When I thought in my mind that it was the last time I’d ever see him (the him that I loved before I met Adam), I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. I made it a very dramatic moment. Shocker.
When it was the last time I’d ever see him, I knew it deep in my soul. I said goodbye, and I asked him to “come back”, and I meant for another kiss. But he said “I’ll see you at Christmas”, which didn’t happen, no surprise; but even in that very moment, I knew he was already gone.
Have you ever lived something like that? How do you recover?
I’ve never truly recovered from that, I’ll be completely honest. It doesn’t mean I haven’t moved on from that relationship, or that I haven’t dealt with it in one way or another. Coped, ya know.
But how do you deal with THAT? Those feelings of unrequital, of doors left slightly ajar, of a window left open for the rain to blow in and stain the sill.
Y’all I wrote a post a few weeks ago about knowing you might be experiencing something for the last time and living it fully. But I’ve been thinking; how do you overcome the fear that it is the last time? Does that fear change the way you experience it? I honestly don’t even know.
I can say, from my experience, that in this instance… the time I thought it was the last time, my fear of that ruined it. It made the whole thing unenjoyable and awful, for both of us involved. For everybody really, because my roommates had to deal with the fallout of that too lol. Sorry pals.
The time I knew it was the last time, it wasn’t something I realized until after the fact.. Because I was so tied up in living in it fully. I swear. I was having a good time, I was living and loving, not giving in to my anxieties that it was over. I wasn’t living in the future me fears. I was loving the moment I was in.
Then, after I realized, after the goodbyes were said and the morning drop off was made, I knew it was done. I knew that was the last time. And I was able to cope, more or less. Somehow. But even still, to this day, it makes me upset; I can’t lie. It’s a strange feeling, knowing you’re in the last time while you’re in it.
And now, having moved states, leaving my family and best friends 11 hours behind, doing all these new things and knowing that I’ve been in the last moments of things the past few months but I didn’t even realize it- part of me is glad of that, because it kept the melancholy sadness, the mourning of a certain version of me, away. It kept me from drowning in that. But then another part of me wished I had known more, that I had been able to savor some of those moments in a “last time” kind of way.
It’s something I’ve dealt with many times, from relationships I’ve loved to life moments I’ve adored to everything in between. The last time I ate dinner at a beautiful Cincinnati Italian staple, the last time I had wine at Kentucky Native in Lexington, the last time I had wings in NYC or pizza in Tokyo. So many lasts, that might be lasts but might not be lasts, but you have to treat them like they’re lasts. Because who truly, TRULY knows if you will be back there again?
It makes you look at life in a unique, special way, I think. It brings life but also mourning into every single moment. It makes you savor putting up ornaments with your momma as if you’ll die tomorrow, but also it makes the memory next year that much sweeter and that much heavier. It makes it that much more difficult to mourn things when they're gone, too.
Because when you’ve lived every single moment with that much emotion, you’ve put so much love and life into your heart and into your memories that when they’re gone, remembering is difficult. Because there is so much emotion in every one of them, it all comes back in the most insane rush. It can be debilitating even.
It’s hard to live with that much emotion inside of you always. But it does make living life so much heavier, but also so much more full.
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