letting go

 have been saying goodbye to some things in my life lately, and in biding my farewells I have learned some new things….

We don’t say goodbye to people we say goodbye to the relationship, the association, the amorphous blend of you and them, this itself is not a farewell but a parting. It is the extraction of the nebulous you that floats around outside your body and has become entangled with the soul of another human.

This “parting”  is where you  call your spirit back to yourself, I discovered that this is not like whistling for a dog, it is more akin to trying to fill a jar with smoke.

However as the hours stretch into days and those add up to weeks you seem to find bits of  yourself, little solid chunks of you, that you lost somewhere along the way.

I have been gathering these little bits of me, some of them no longer fit into this multi dimensional jigsaw puzzle called being, I have looked at them carefully and examined myself to try and find how this idea or belief that I had temporarily let go of belongs, some have had to be gently placed back down as there was no place for them, others I discovered where like finding your old soft sleeping shirt, worn in and comfortable and fits back into as if the parting had been brief.

Then as the weeks become months you put that which is past behind you, in a very real sense, you learn the lessons at best, acknowledge the pain and the unpleasantness and let it all go. What to do with the good memories, the times you laughed, the times you believed yourself happy? I have looked at those things to and careful packed them away – they will live forever in a box in my mind, they do not exist in my present and have no place in my future, but somewhere I believe the lesson must be to never forget the best version of you on the days that were good.