A letter to my old friend

Peace might not feel so far away now.

I saw you for coffee today.

The first time we’ve spent more than five minutes together in over two years.

You wore jeans I had never seen before, mine you said you recognized.

We sat for coffee and caught up for hours - you told me your mum got married and you paint now, I told you about my trip to Europe and that the city is slowly starting to feel like home.

We talked, we shared, but we didn’t go back to normal.

I didn’t call you by your nickname, you didn’t call me by mine. Full names, while once so foreign to us, is now the only way to refer to one another - undoubtedly a parallel for our current state.

At the end of our time together, it was clear to both of us - we weren’t the same people we used to be.

You have changed, as have I.

And while that can be incredibly heartbreaking, it can also offer great peace.

How lucky are we to have grown so much in the past two years to hardly recognize each other?

How lucky are we to have had the opportunity to fully experience the past versions of ourselves, the versions of one another that no longer exist so therefore live in our little corner of the Universe, the corner reserved for no one else but one another?

The present time has no space for us, but our past, our past will be irrevocably, unforgettably, overwhelmingly you and me. For we are the only people that got to truly know, truly experience those gone versions of one another.

The idea of “moving on” and “letting go” will never resonate for our relationship. To move on, to let go - what does that really mean?

To forget each other forever? To we pretend that the five years of love we shared never existed? To hate the one human being we used to call our person?

I refuse to accept that concept, for it’s wildy untrue, incredibly inaccurate.

I will never erase our past - I will never pretend you didn’t exist, that you didn’t mean more to me than anything, anyone I’d ever met. You were there in the dark moments, the hard moments, the moments I would never share with anyone else.

Always my first love. Always my university best friend. Always my entire life for those five years.

And this, this, is what gives me peace, this is what gives me the allowance to step fully into the present reality of my life - the fact that I can hold an immense amount of love and gratitude for what we were to one another, I can hope to never forget, never erase it from my memory, but I can recognize that it no longer fits into my current reality. That the life I live today is so much fuller, so much more aligned, so much more me.

Who I am today, who you are today, they don’t fit together anymore. Our pocket of time stays where it should - in the past.

We loved each other for a long time, but it’s done now.

And that can be okay.