If you had asked me two weeks ago where I’d be now, my sense of reality would have looked very different. If you’d asked me even this morning before writing this, it probably would have been the same. I was suspended. Between what my mind kept hoping for and what my body already knew. Between the familiar ache of waiting and the quieter, harder voice of self-respect.
There’s a saying about walking down the same street, falling into the same hole, and expecting a different outcome. In my thirty-five years, I’ve known that street well. I’ve walked it more times than I can count. Sometimes unconsciously. Sometimes telling myself it would be different this time. And often, staying far longer than I should, waiting for someone else to arrive with the ladder, when all along I was the one standing there with it.
In love, I learned early to ration myself. To offer pieces instead of presence. To reveal slowly, not as a choice, but as a defense. I learned to make myself digestible, manageable, careful. To bury the deeper parts until they felt earned. And in doing that, I kept meeting the same story in different forms. Different faces, familiar endings. Each time I wondered how something that felt so full could dissolve so quietly.
Last year became a long season of déjà vu. Old chapters reopened. Old patterns welcomed back in. There is a particular comfort in what is familiar, even when it hurts. A revolving door that always leads to the same room. By the time summer softened into fall, I had finally closed a five-year passage of my life. Not dramatically. Not angrily. Just honestly. With nothing left unsaid and a quiet understanding that some connections are meant to end, not because they lack meaning, but because they no longer hold truth.
It felt right then to be alone. After the upheaval of that year, solitude sounded like a kind of restoration. And yet, as the weather changed, so did the longing. The human wanting for warmth. For witness. For another nervous system to rest beside. I found myself in something new. And in it, I noticed both what was familiar — my slowness, my guardedness, my instinct to hold back — and what was not. There was ease here. Safety. Presence. A version of connection I hadn’t known before.
This time, the story didn’t end in devastation. It ended in recognition.
I can see where I was loved.
I can see where I was still learning how to let myself be known.
I can see the places I reached for old protection, even as something new was being offered.
And I can also see the moment where my responsibility shifted. Where waiting stopped being tenderness and started becoming self-abandonment.
This chapter doesn’t close with me feeling broken. It closes with me feeling awake. With grief, yes. With love, yes. But also with an unfamiliar steadiness. Because for the first time, the ending isn’t about why I wasn’t chosen.
It’s about the moment I chose myself.
And I do that now not in anger, and not in armor, but with gratitude. For what was real. For what was beautiful. For what taught me. And for what finally asked me to step off a road I’ve walked long enough.
With love, for the story that was.
With trust in the one I’m beginning.
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