bajo la misma luna
I started publishing my writing around the time I got my heart broken. Initially, writing helped me mold my huge and ungraspable emotions into tangible shapes and colors. And releasing it into the world helped me assert my own right to exist as exactly who I am.
I write for myself, but of course I still want people to read. I wouldn’t be posting here if I didn’t. Most of all, I wanted my “Muse” to read. I thought that if he did, maybe he’d finally understand the depth of the pain that he caused me.
But I think I know better now. Many people cannot express nor receive the same depth of emotion, empathy, or thoughtfulness that I do. And that’s okay. My desire for that reciprocation is natural, but it doesn’t entitle me to it from specific individuals.
After months of ambivalence, I reached out to Mr. Muse to resolve the dissonance raging inside me. I did not overthink it. I simply felt the urge, wrote what I had to say, and sent. Easy.
Contrast that with the previous few months, when I’d wrack my brain with anxiety, writing things over and over in my notes, deleting them, writing again, running it by my friends, sleeping on it, deciding it was stupid and that he didn’t deserve my attention, and repeat. Months passed by, but the ache remained.
I always stopped myself from actually hitting “send” because I knew if I ever were to reach out, it would have to happen calmly, organically, and naturally. I had allow time to heal me enough that I could face the possibility that he’d shut me out once again.
He didn’t. And I’m grateful.
For those agonizing months prior, it felt like I was under some sort of spell, one where I forgot that he is a real person – like me – and is nothing really out of the ordinary – like me. When I answered his call and heard him apologize, I snapped out of it.
He appeared to me again as the friend I always knew, before the intense-but-short-lived romance: a normal, flawed, complex human being who fucks up too. It was like no time had passed at all since we’d last spoken.
For all these months, I so badly wanted him to be a proactive person like me. I waited for him to realize the error of his ways, to reach out and apologize. It never happened. In the end, I had to be the brave one and claim closure for myself.
But I accept both of us for who we are now. We are simply on different paths, ones that were only ever meant to briefly intersect.
In that moment that we said our goodbyes, the loop finally completed. He was right all along. It wasn’t a matter of him not trying hard enough. He really couldn’t give me what I needed, just as he’d told me.
At last, he had finally fallen from my heavens. He was no longer an untouchable myth.
It’s funny. Somebody can break me completely, yet I can still hold so much love for them. I can still cherish the time we spent together and the role they played in my life. I can still experience beautiful moments and think of them, knowing how much they’d love it too. I can still value the lessons I learned from them and the positive examples they set for me. I can still know that despite all the good they brought to my life, I didn’t deserve the treatment they gave me in the end.
Most importantly, I can still gaze at the moon and feel connected to them somehow. Even with no exchanging of words, I am content knowing that we sleep under the very same one.