the soft art of forgetting

there comes a point when you stop waiting for something to return.

not out of anger, not even out of acceptance, but out of quiet exhaustion.

you just get tired of standing at the same emotional doorway, hoping a familiar knock will sound again.

we grow up believing every ending deserves closure.

that people who leave will one day circle back with apologies and explanations neat enough to fold away the ache.

but the truth is, some stories end mid sentence, and that’s all they ever were.

learning that not everything lost was meant to be found again feels like standing at the edge of a memory and realising you no longer belong there.

it’s peaceful and painful in equal measure.

the names you once whispered before sleep become lighter, their edges blur, until one day you can’t quite remember the sound of their laugh, and it doesn’t hurt the way it used to.

you stop checking who watched your stories.

you stop writing messages you’ll never send.

instead, you start noticing smaller things.

the way morning light spills across your floor.

the comfort of silence.

how your coffee tastes better when you aren’t rushing.

you begin to understand that moving on isn’t about filling the space someone left behind.

it’s about learning to sit with the emptiness without begging it to be full.

it’s about letting time do what it does best, soften what once felt impossible.

and in that quiet, you meet yourself again.

not the version who was always trying to fix or prove or chase.

but the one who survived.

the one who stayed.

healing rarely looks like joy.

it’s often a long stretch of in between, learning how to stop rereading old conversations, how to stop decoding silence, how to stop asking what if.

and then one day, you realise you’ve gone an entire week without thinking of them.

you’ve laughed for real.

you’ve slept through the night.

and you understand, you didn’t need them to return to feel whole again.

not everything lost was meant to be found again.

some things leave so you can finally see what’s been here all along, your own becoming, your own peace.