A Necessary Death

Letting go with love so we can fully inhabit the lives we have chosen.

This is a necessary death.

Not because there isn’t love. There is so much love.

The depth of our love has brought us back to each other more than once.

We have found clarity. We have let each other go. We have grieved the relationship and said goodbye. And then somehow, here we are again.

There have been cycles that needed healing. Patterns that needed to be lived more than once before we could fully see them. Wounds that seemed to find exactly the right place in one another to rise to the surface.

That is part of what makes this so difficult. Our returning wasn’t meaningless. It wasn’t simply repeating the same relationship over and over again. Each time, there was more awareness, more honesty, more depth, more love.

We met each other differently because we were different.

And still, eventually, we would arrive back at the same truth.

There are places where our lives, our needs, and our paths simply do not align.

Maybe some cycles repeat because we haven’t learned the lesson yet. Perhaps we needed to return a few times to receive everything the relationship came here to give us.

There has been so much beauty between us. And there is also misalignment that can no longer be softened, explained away, or loved into something different.

We are meant for different paths.

Somewhere along the way, we began pulling each other toward our own paths. Each of us trying to stay true to where we were being called while somehow also trying to keep one foot planted in the other’s world.

There is an incredible amount of energy in that struggle. Energy spent trying to bridge what may not be ours to bridge. Energy spent trying to make two paths become one when they are asking to part.

What I can feel now is that letting go is not a failure of our love. It is one of its deepest expressions.

A releasing of one another back to ourselves.

Back to the lives we are each choosing. Back to our creativity, our purpose, our own becoming. Back to the energy that has been tied up in trying to make something work that life is clearly asking us to release.

There is something so sacred and fucking heartbreaking about loving someone enough to stop asking them to walk your path. And loving yourself enough to stop leaving yours to walk theirs.

This is a death.

Not everything that dies was wrong.

It has lived its season, given us its medicine, changed us forever, and now asks to be released so that whatever is meant to be born next has room to breathe.

This hurts.

Letting go of a love that has changed me, healed me, and brought me back to myself in so many ways.

There is a clarity beneath the grief that I cannot unknow. A quiet liberation in no longer fighting what I know to be true.

There is peace.

I can grieve what we are losing while honoring what we are each being called toward.

I don't know what comes after this, but I trust where life is taking us.

Loving deeply and letting go, Melissa