Letting someone go — when it is a necessary act of self-preservation, something that has to come if you expect to move forward in life — is regarded as a kind of victory. You have successfully overcome an emotional trauma that once surrounded you like a kind of fog which prevented you from ever seeing the sun. People will tell you, always with the best intentions, that one day you are going to wake up and realize that you are okay, and your life is not immediately over because they are no longer a part of it. And this is true, though it’s not the net positive that we are so quick to label it as. Because it’s not as though you simply wake up one day and proclaim yourself fine, suddenly hearing birds chirp and children laugh after months of only your own oppressive silence. You simply start to forget, feeling the acute pain of the loss less and less as each day goes on. There will come a day when you don’t care, but you won’t notice it, because you will have other things to think about.

We have to stop caring what they would think if they saw us, stop worrying about running into them in the store, stop obsessing over the things we could have done differently to make them stay. And that means letting go of everything they meant to us, proving to ourselves that life can be just as good, just as beautiful, without them in it. When you realize, long after the fact, that you no longer care about someone — that what they are doing in life has no bearing on you, and vice versa — it feels very much like a small death. Who they were with you no longer exists, and you cannot even preserve it in your memory, for the sake of your own mental health.