You know that feeling you get which only exists when you come across someone whom you had long forgotten about? It's almost like a scar - a wound that was once so painful however it's been healing on your skin forever, you forgot about its presence.  You touch it again, vaguely remembering the wound it once was and how much it hurt, but now it does not cause too much discomfort anymore. You are my scar, you've become a part of me. 

A deep-rooted societal problem is that humans are predisposed to keep trying. We're not allowed to give up. We're not supposed to admit defeat. It is ingrained in us from birth to never give up, and to always try again, and again. We have to hold on as it makes us feel strong, we cannot let good things go, we can't stop, it's what we know and it's comfortable. But why should we live like this? We can't go through life living in our comfort zones, there is so much out there to love. Why should we hold on to someone/something till we're feeling defeated, weak and slumped over? If we're living in a state of defeat, are we really living anymore? 

I used to feel and think this way. I used to think that it meant I was weak if I didn't hold on, and if I let someone go I was just giving up. However, most of the time, the best and strongest thing for us is to be set free. From letting go of a piece of clothing you know you'll never wear again, to letting go of that person that we once loved but won't get to love again; at least not at this moment. It's an incredibly valuable thing to learn in life because it teaches us how to keep ourselves happy and value our own well-being over not being alone. We should be with people who we enjoy being around, who make us feel good and happy and loved. We are all valuable and deserve to be valued, and we shouldn't hang onto those who are not worthy of us. 

It's not easy to let go though. It's not so simple to let all of that pain just disappear. Because if we want to remove the pain and person that has occupied our hearts for so long, we have to let everything go. We can't choose the memories we want to isolate for our own nostalgia. They exist within us as stories with beginning and endings, and we are not able to pick and choose what memories we want to keep as one memory will always bleed into another, which leads to the memory of their eventual departure in our lives. We have to stop thinking about them, stop obsessing over the things that maybe we could've done differently to make them stay. We have to let go of everything they meant to us. We have to prove to ourselves that our lives can be just as beautiful and worth living without them in it. It feels very much like death, when you finally realise that you no longer care about someone (and vice versa) and how they're living life has no more affect on you. For your own sake, the person they were when they were with you is no longer preserved in your memory. 

Now I regard letting go as a kind of victory - regardless of the reason. Letting go is something that we need to learn to do in order to move forward in life, its a necessary act of self-preservation. Letting go is like stepping out of a fog that once surrounded you and prevented you from seeing the sun. Eventually, you will wake up one day and realise that you are in fact okay. After being drowned in your own oppressive silence, slowly but surely you will simply start to forget. The acute feeling of pain of losing someone will lessen with each passing day, and finally there will come a day when you don't care and better yet, you won't notice it, because you will have other things to think about. How can we expect ourselves to open up to new experiences and new people if we're so stuck on the past? 

I haven't spoken to you in awhile, and as we exchanged words it felt different from before, and it was slightly unsettling. It felt as if it was some form of unspoken confirmation that things between us have changed, that I've let you go and you've let me go. It felt like it was out of necessity, with both of us knowing clearly that holding onto each other would not make what we had come back to us, despite our deepest compulsions and instincts telling us each time we meet we're meant to be. The part of ourselves we needed to erase to move on were just going to have to be forgotten. You told me you never forgotten about me, and I agreed because you never really forget about anyone, you just release them. And we released each other. We stopped allowing what I do and what you do to have any meaning to each other. I've let you move on, and I've let you fall in love again. I know when I see you when I'm back, I won't be sad because the person I once knew exists somewhere within you, but I'm separated by too much time to try to reach him again. 

As much as I've missed you, I'm learning to move on and I've let you go. I've learned to love myself and I've definitely learned to put my own feelings as priority. I know that I have to be happy first before others can give me happiness. I still miss you and I'm ever so thankful that you're a part of my life, a part of me.