How I Am Getting Over You

by Sejal Parikh · August 31, 2015

I do not know why they keep telling me to get over you.

As if getting over you were a thing in my control. Like a switch I could just flip on and let be…

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Sometimes, I wonder if that could come to be. It would be darned easy to not carry around the weight of a million pieces of my heart all around. To not hear the rattle of those shards bumping into each other, to not feel their hide and seek game piercing through my skin – making it impossible for those wounds from two years ago to heal.

Yes – it’s been two years and I am still getting over you. Maybe.

Maybe I haven’t even begun.

Maybe I do not know how to.

Or maybe I already am getting over you – and I just do not know I am.

I don’t know which… I really don’t know… and I don’t need to…

All I do know is that I revisit those old texts whenever I pick up the phone to send a text. I trace the outline of those three magical words at the end of each message, as if willing my fingers to soak up whatever of your love has remained for me…

I often pull out those photo albums tucked beneath my clothes in the closet, when getting ready for some place and end up not going at all, coz my hands are busy trying to hold your face once again… and trace the curve of the smile playing on the lips I could kiss forever…

I replay our conversations in my head… only to pause at my favorite portions, rewind and replay the conversation again… as if the memory could teleport me to the moment, allowing me to relive what I have lost…

I often hold the li’l pieces of ‘happy’ you’d given me to take home – as if that seashell necklace you made me from that walk on the beach or the gigantic teddy you won for me at the fair – could replace my hurt with happy…

But nothing eases the pain, nothing brings back the happy, nothing brings back YOU…

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You have been gone a long time…

I remember the day. You’d sprung it upon me as the sun was setting, eclipsing your form in the vanishing day. And as I extended my arm to touch your fading silhouette in the darkness, you were gone… not quite far yet… but far away from me. As I picked my sunken weight from between the sheets that knew us as ONE to become ME, I asked you if WE’d never BE… and you gave me the silence of the night… As I reached the door, I turned to ask you one last time what had gone wrong… and you gave me the silence of the night… When I turned the knob, I cried and asked you if you didn’t love me anymore… and you gave me the silence of the night…

I have not quite seen the sun since… never known a morning since…

All I hear is the silence of that night… with the faint echoes of what we’d been… and the crashing pain of everything we never could be…

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I wish I’d seen your face one last time, wish I’d hugged you one last time, wish I’d made love to you one last time, wish I’d heard you say ‘I love you’ one last time… one last time…

Even if it would have made it that much harder to leave… even if it would have made the hurt unbearable, and even if it would have meant that I’d never ever be getting over you…

Coz I don’t think I am doing any better otherwise…

I am not getting over you… not in the way the world wants me to…

Suggested read: Learning to fall in love with breakups

I am getting over you by understanding that if I choose to bottle your memories and toss them in the ocean… I will not be getting over you…

Or if I choose to make a wish upon your lost love and send it upward like a kid letting go of a balloon, I would be undoing OUR love…

Or that even if I chose to delete your number or block you on social media, I could never be deleting you from my heart, my soul, or my life…

Coz there’s this one life-threatening lethal crack in my heart that ripped it apart and drained all the blood out – making it a wounded mess in my chest – where YOU stay – and that does not need any healing. It does not need any getting over either.

Coz sometimes, just sometimes, getting over someone means to love them still…

I am getting over you by loving you still…

I am getting over you by believing in love still…

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Summary