The Art of Letting Go

No one ever tells you that letting go feels like treason.
Not treason against them, but against yourself.

Because in the beginning, every fiber of your being protests.
It whispers that clinging is virtuous, that if you endure with greater patience, or love with greater intensity, perhaps time will rewind and restore what once felt eternal.

But it never does.

Letting go is never a single act. It is a battle waged in silence, a conflict fought daily with unseen wounds.
It is erasing their number from your phone, yet finding it carved into your memory with cruel permanence.
It is standing beneath the cascade of water, hearing again the cadence of their laughter, and bracing yourself against the wall because the memory strikes with the force of a blow.
It is pretending to be unscathed, while every melody, every familiar street, every lingering fragrance resurrects their absence.

And still, voices around you say, “Just move on.”
As though detachment were as effortless as leaving behind a room once rented.
As though the heart were not a cathedral where their echo reverberates through every chamber.

Here lies the unvarnished truth: you cannot erase someone who carved themselves into your existence.
You can only learn the discipline of living without their presence.
That is where the art begins.

It resides in the merciless discipline of restraint.
Resisting the impulse to send a message that burns at your fingertips.
Refusing to seek fragments of them in photographs and feeds.
Declining to ask friends for glimpses of a life that is no longer yours to touch.
It resides in the breath you steady when the phantom of their touch overwhelms you.
It resides in the courage to reclaim the vast, echoing space of yourself, even when that space feels desolate.

And then, without grandeur, without applause, the torment softens.
The wound becomes a scar, the scar becomes a story, and the story becomes something you can carry without trembling.
Until one day, almost imperceptibly, you no longer turn back.
Not because they have been erased, but because you have remembered the one person you could not afford to lose—yourself.

That is the art of letting go.
It was never about losing them.
It has always been about refusing to surrender you.                                 

 -Arnav