Past loves don’t ever really leave us. If our heart was a hotel, the rooms are never really fully vacated when the love is gone. Like forgotten luggage, pieces of love are left behind as memories and stray feelings.
Maybe you don’t love them anymore, not like that. But there were those moments that will always be perfect and something about that will always feel a little haunting.
You never quite know when you’ll encounter one. You’ll be going about your daily life and something, a wafting smell, or a familiar time of day, or a stranger’s gait — it will relentlessly dig up a memory that you hadn’t touched in months or years. You’ll feel a heaviness in your heart that is confusing, and surprising. I thought I was over this, you’ll think to yourself. But all it takes is one familiar snippet, one anchor into the past, and you’re back there wondering how you still feel something like love after so long.
The look they gave you right before saying I love you for the first time.
A joke that you two shared, that no one else will ever quite understand.
The way they knew all of your favorite snacks and would hide them in your bag when you weren’t looking.
I’ve stumbled upon a plethora of such memories lately, from a past love, tucked carefully away in a corner of my heart. I still visit this corner sometimes, on purpose, but I’ve been going there less and less.
Yet lately, there is someone new and the way he looks at me reminds me of how it felt to be loved by this old love of mine. It makes me flutter but it also hurts my heart and I’m trying to hold all of that inside of my chest.
So much of the advice about moving on involves being ruthless with old love. It involves reminding yourself of the bad times and using resentment to shield yourself from grief. It involves filling the space that your old love occupied with a new love, so you don’t have to stare longingly at the gaping hole for very long.
But what about just simply missing your old love sometimes? Can you give yourself permission to just be sad about the loss of this person that once mattered so much to you? Can you feel all of that heaviness inside without a timeline?
Putting a timeline on your grieving process is damaging and is a way of gaslighting yourself. I know because I did it, and I still do it sometimes as a knee-jerk way to avoid pain. Memories of him sneak up on me and it hurts and I think you haven’t talked for almost a year, do you really still miss him? And I have to catch myself and answer that question softly and vulnerably.
Yes, I still miss him, and yes I’ll probably miss him for a while and that’s just going to have to be okay.
Missing someone doesn’t have to mean that you’re still pining after them. Missing someone doesn’t mean you’re pathetic. Missing someone just means that your heart remembers how it felt to love them and is noticing their absence. There is nothing more human than that.
I think we should normalize non-linear grieving processes. We should give ourselves permission to miss the hell out of someone on a random Tuesday, months or years after we’ve ended things with them. The heart knows no timelines. Feelings aren’t linear or logical. Old loves that have made a home in your heart don’t just vacate overnight.
So what if instead of ruthlessly evicting our old love, we just release it piece by piece? As we find pieces of old love left in our corners, we pick them up and hold them delicately. We remember how that love shaped us. We thank that love for what it taught us, even if it taught us by showing us how to mourn a forever that would never be.
Your heart has no agenda except feeling what it feels. Your heart is not in a rush, it’s your mind that’s trying to dictate timelines.
So next time you stumble upon a piece of old love, remind yourself that it’s okay to miss someone no matter how long they’ve been gone. Remind yourself that it’s okay to be human ❤
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Previously published on medium
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Photo credit: Unsplash
Thanks for this reminder that missing an old love happens because that time with them was important, it has meaning. An ending doesn’t mean the history is gone or didn’t matter.