There are lots of things in life that aren’t fun to deal with.
Spilling your coffee all over yourself when it’s barely 8 in the morning, for one. Or stepping on a piece of gum in your brand new shoes and having to miserably pull your leg away from the sidewalk like a deranged person.
Even the little things like finding that you’re just short of having enough change to pay for that coffee, so you’re forced to pull out your debit card and allow the nickels and dimes to jingle, jangle in your pocket the rest of the day. Or just missing the green light, having to suffer through an 80-plus degree day with no air conditioner, or walking outside only to have it start downpouring — and of course, you don’t have an umbrella.
But one of the things that really isn’t fun to deal with?
Missing someone, especially when you know there’s nothing you can do to get them back, and you know that you shouldn’t really want them back, anyways. It’s hard, losing a friend or a significant other. It leaves us with a sense of emptiness, as though there’s a pocket in ourselves that isn’t full.
We may not be able to put it into words, but it’s there, like a dark little abyss, and we can’t seem to figure out how to close it up.
The worst part is when you want to close it up, but you just can’t. You know that missing that person is futile, and yet, there it is: that sense of loss.
Eventually, the day comes when you think you’ve gotten over it. You think you can finally move on and stop missing that person. But then you hear that song or visit that place you both used to love, and you get a little twinge on the strings of your heart. You can feel the ache pulling in you, and you struggle against it.
You know that missing them is useless, but you do it anyways.
You might even begin to hope that they’ll return to you. You hope for an apologetic text message or an accidental run-in when you go for your mid-morning run or your afternoon coffee. You hope that you have a chance to speak to them again, to either mend the wound or finally close it.
The world keeps spinning, and not everyone comes back around. Not everyone should.
Maybe closure, not a return to normalcy, is what you really need.
The thing about life is that closure doesn’t always come, not in the way we’d like. Sometimes, things are left wide open; when that happens, you’ve got to be the one carrying the needle and thread and sewing that wound shut. It may take days, weeks, months, even years; but bit by bit, you sew a little each day. And sometimes, something happens and the whole seam rips open and everything falls out and you’re like “WHAT THE HECK,” but you can always start sewing again.
Believe me, closure will come…. someday. For now, just keep sewing.
thoughts of Melissa 