The first breakup I ever went through wrecked me. It completely obliterated my heart and left me up at odd hours of the night researching the grieving process. I could barely speak. I was in pain for a long time, the kind that nestles into your bones and never fully leaves.

The last breakup I went through was entirely different, for I was the one to walk away. I was the one making decisions in the dark. I was the one relieved and liberated, not heartbroken and in shock. Yet even still, the oddness of breaking up did not escape me. The suddenness of this person ceasing to exist at all seemed unreal. You don’t have to want them back or even miss them to feel the strangeness of that absence. They are just gone. You are strangers to each other again. They only live inside of momentary memories that occupy random corners of your mind and pop up when you see their water bottle in someone else’s hands on a Tuesday afternoon.

It doesn’t matter what side you end up on, whether you loved them, whether you hated them, or not. All that matters is that you spent a period of time getting closer to this one human than anyone else in your life, learning their secrets and desires and innermost thoughts on anything imaginable, and then, for one reason or another, you walked away.

So I think about it all the time. I think about every friend and lover that has fallen through my hands like water and what they might be doing now. Everywhere I go I see bits and pieces of everything and every place and everyone that I have ever loved. They are in my laugh, they live inside of the words that I say. They occupy the spaces between my bones, latent in every movement that I make. I see the world through a kaleidoscope made up of each perspective that I have encountered. It doesn’t matter if they are here or there, the people that have mattered to me continue to inform and enhance my experience of this world long after they have gone.

So maybe each ending will always feel like Rome falling and I will always be dancing in ruin of some lost love, even if just for a moment. And maybe I’m a romantic who can never let anything go or a writer who is never quite done juicing prose out of experience, but I think that we are all perhaps perpetually dancing in our own unique set of ruins as we move through life. I would like to think that we have that much in common.

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