You know how you leave so many tabs open on your computer because you keep opening new information you want to check out later for your research but you eventually never go back to it? This sometimes makes your computer slow or crash in extreme cases, well that’s how I am beginning to feel with some relationships in my life and I am left wondering if I will ever get closure at the rate it is going.
Have you ever made decisions that you keep going back to review because even when you took a step and you were 75 percent sure you were heading in a good direction, the other 25 percent was still strong enough to keep you guessing almost perpetually if you are doing the right thing?
I have never been one to walk out on relationships without a proper goodbye but these days even when you want to do things right, some people are not just cut out for amicable endings. They prefer the ghost method so you get the most cowardly exit ever and you are left to unpack what is happening and what you did to deserve the silence. It happens with friendship too, you have a conversation that is more provoking than engaging and both parties leave knowing they are valid to hang on to whatever reasons that is bigger than the friendship at the moment.
It is so bad with adult friendship that sometimes you wonder if you are still friends, if the friendship is on pause or if you should just wait to supervise the friendship down the drain. When people talk about closure, I have often understood it from the perspective of amicability. You know difficult and necessary discussions on why a status quo cannot be maintained.
Lately, I have started to realise that closing a chapter doesn’t always happen the way we intend. Many times, we are forced to close a chapter of our life even when we don’t feel ready to let go or move on, sometimes, the choice is made for us and we are left in the whirlwind to decide on a way forward.
Death is one of such chapters, I think people die in the middle of life events and that’s like an unclosed tab in a computer, people exit leaving family and friends wondering how life could be so cruel or so brief. These goodbyes happen on one side with the alive party feeling helpless with nothing to do but resign to acceptance.
Some relationships end like death in these ways. You are in the middle of a plans, unwashed laundry, a semi live-in situation, some of your clothes left in the apartment of an ex, you can vividly see all the places in their house that you left your things thinking the next week will be as the previous one but then everything changes, all the comfort that gave you access suddenly disappears, you are met with a block of unanswered questions and every time you want to move on, you keep seeing that scene dragging you back because you keep thinking to yourself, this person may appear again, we never closed this tab.
If you have ever been in this place, how did you overcome this huddle?
There is no easy answer and I read somewhere that healing should not have a timeline but that statement worried me because the opposite is perpetual hurting and more often than not, the end goal of healing to come to a place where the hurt ceases to weigh you down or hold you back from happiness, or maybe healing is just having the peace to cope with the difficulties?
I find it hard to accept a reality of healing where there is no end, I would rather call it renewal and growth, that is easier for me to accept. So what do you do here? in situations where you are forced to say goodbye against you will, do you go back to forge a goodbye? do you hold a solitary goodbye ceremony or do you brave contact again and chance reopening healing wounds?
This is the conundrum I now find myself and I wish I had an answer but this post is also my way of seeking clarity. My instinct tells me that every goodbye is peculiar and that within the hurt we can determine how best to close that door.
For some of us it may be revisiting the scene, or just being brave enough to shut that door irrespective of what may come bursting through later on, or maybe like a burial, hold a cremation ceremony and just burn the entire scene altogether.
In my case, I guess it is time to visit the ghost of a scene past. To ask my friend if this is the new template of friendship we should operate by, to ask that lover for one more moment for the road?
😬ish…
Wish me luck.
XOXO,
Dcconnoisseur.
Connoisseur of Memories 