This is me letting you go

-Heidi Priebe , Book Review

Aj writes
4 min readOct 6, 2022

. Take a chance on me

Take a chance on me, even though I cannot promise it will be worth it. I have no guarantees, no crystal ball, no vision of the future where we’re happy and healthy and together for the rest of our days. I have been promised too many forevers to have much faith in them anymore so instead I’d like to offer you right now. I can offer you only this moment, where I’m standing in front of you knowing all of this may someday fall apart but that someday is not what I’m looking for anymore. I have right here and right now and all I can hope is that that is enough. That we can figure out the future as it comes.

Take a chance on me – because I want to take a chance on you.

And it only has to work out once.

. Let Me Fall In Love With Your Darkness

Tell me the ways in which you never came back. Give me a map with coordinates that lead into the deepest, most twisted corner of your soul where all of your unconquered demons still lurk.

Let me see them. Let me reach out and touch them with my own trembling fingers, because I still can’t bear to face my own.

Talk to me about the times you couldn’t look at yourself in the mirror or fall asleep at night because the malevolence and madness of your own mind kept you reeling. Give me your vices and misjudgments because I can match each one with my own. Tell me all the ways in which you’re scarred by your own capacity for darkness.

I don’t want your good intentions and your well wishes. I want the whole of you, the depth of you, the breadth of all you are and the light that shines in between your broken parts. Let me fall in love with what you’re missing, what you’ve lost and what you’re still holding onto, through and despite all of it. Show me the things you haven’t lost along the way. And I will show you your own greatest strengths.

. How To Love Someone You Cannot Hold Onto

We don’t need to curse and resent and forget the people life didn’t let us hold onto. We don’t have to rid ourselves of their impressions and shelter ourselves from their impact. We’re allowed to let them in. We’re allowed to let them matter. We’re allowed to engage in the temporary foolishness of falling for someone who is not going to be left holding our crippled, wrinkled hand fifty years down the road.

Because some people simply are not meant to stay forever. Some people come into our lives for a season, for a reason, for the simple purpose of showing us the world in a way we would never have seen it otherwise.

. This Is Me Letting You Go

This is me accepting that you’re leaving. It’s my acknowledgment that there’s no further argument to make, no angle left to take, no plea or bargain I could wager that could get you to change your mind and stay. It’s my acceptance of all I couldn’t bridge.

This is my acceptance that I’m going to miss you. That there are going to be nights where I curl up in bed with a novel and a warm mug of tea and your absence on the left side of the bed is a chasm that swells and envelopes me.

This is me knowing life goes on. Knowing that someday I will not think of love as a feeling that’s exclusive to you and I, as crazy as that seems to me right now. That eventually I’ll meet someone new – someone who loves the foods you hate and laughs at things you don’t find funny and appreciates the parts of me that you once left undiscovered.

This is me knowing that I have to let you go. That no matter how much I love you or how hard we work at this or how badly we both want each other to be happy, we are never going to be the right partners for each other. This is my acceptance that the best things are never straightforward and that I want you to take whatever crooked, twisted path you need to take if it will lead you towards your dreams. This is me knowing that sometimes the best thing you can do for someone you love is to let them go.

So this is me unclasping my fingers.

This is my parting, my reluctance, my heartache and my final gift to you.

This is me letting you go.

This book! I have been running from my emotions for a while and this book brought me right at the middle of everything I needed to address and I hated that as much as I loved it. No, I didn’t cry reading it. Maybe. But finishing this read made me feel like I lost a friend.

Such a beautifully articulated book. So much to resonate with. I enjoyed reading it.

🌟4.5

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Aj writes

Nothing in life is constant but change and dealing with change is central to one's growth. Heraclitus noted that “everything changes and nothing stands still.”