The End - Part One

 This won't be a long post, because it's 10:23 and I'm very tired already, and I desperately want to brush my teeth, which isn't usually something I feel so strongly.

Or who knows, maybe it will be long.  Anything goes at 10:23.

I looked at mine and LotN's old messages tonight.  The ones he told me I should if I wanted to understand, but that I couldn't bring myself to at the time.

It was an interesting experience.  I was able to relive those feelings, but at a distance, under the tempering of a little time. 

It started not too unpleasantly.  My main goal was to understand more fully what I had done wrong.  The answer was more complicated than I was expecting.

I hadn't done much wrong at first.  In fact, I initially found myself more frustrated with myself for how hard I was on myself than anything else.  Then things started to shift.

I couldn't put my finger on how, but I felt the transition from vulnerable to uncomfortable in how I spoke.  I doubt that's how it came across to him, but it's what it was.  I was tired and frustrated and fighting, but everything had already gone wrong.  It was over.

And there was that moment watching when I knew that, and I just groaned and said to myself, "Give it up, Anna."  Hypocrite, that song I posted the other night, was made for moments like this.

Don't ask about my past,

I can't bear for you to see me that way.

Since I was looking for my faults, I spent more time on my messages than his, but around the time I started noticing my own past discomfort, I started intermittently looking at his messages.  It was also around this time that my stomach started churning in real time.

I held on too long, too tight to that shred of a relationship.  I found when I got back from my trip that my emotions were still so engaged when I was around him, and this was very concerning to me.  Like a girl in a rom-com, I found myself wondering if I would ever get over him.

Well tonight, I got the answer to that.

There was something more than the discomfort and the vulnerability, the tears and misunderstanding, the baseless hope, that I saw tonight.

I just realized how young I am.  

I've never thought too much about my age.  It's never seemed very important to me.  Years come and go, and time flows on, not in well-defined increments, but constantly, like a river (I wrote a post about that one time too, when I turned fourteen).  But tonight, the fact that I'm only nineteen was smacking me in the face.

My emotions will not last forever.  Those will go, and when they do, it will seem silly that they were ever so strong.

The art of letting go has never come easily to me, and he had a little more time to learn it than I did.  How young of me, to cling so tightly to something so temporary, something that has already slipped out of my grasp.  This is the making of me.  These are the moments that shape me into who I'm going to be.

I am still being made.  Just like I would have changed with and to him if we had made something happen, in God's providence, I'll change with and to this evanescent heartache and come out better for it.  That is history.  That is blessing.

Time to grow up, Anna.  You can't fight for everything.  Some things you have to let fade away, whether they would have worked out or not.  They're gone, and that's the end of your role.

So I carry on, hope tucked into the pocket of my flannel, close to my heart but hidden from the view of others, and I trust that the way the world looks now is not how it will always look to me.

He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.