Remember that, as with most of this relationship, things are imbalanced. You’re the one who kept trying, you’re the one who never let them fall. You’re the fixer and doer, not the sit-back-and-relaxer. You may not feel it at first, but it’s a lot like pulling out sutures instead of allowing them to fall. Tiny shreds will appear in your flesh and make you wish you’d never endeavored to end this … this thing. This ailing, half-alive thing that you both welcomed with such enthusiasm but now feels foreign to you both for different reasons.
Remember that this codependency is holding you upright some days, and vice versa, so the ending isn’t as clean as it could be. See, y’all are enmeshed in a way that isn’t measured by whose dishes are in the cabinets and whose name is on the gas bill. No, baby, y’all wrapped yourselves around each other when you really fucking needed it, and the world stopped every time y’all touched. You held each other with a care and firmness that felt like coming home. You two were in a bubble, ensconsed in each other’s arms, canopied by an unending and loving sky. You need them to love you like that all the time; they have the bandwidth for once in a while. Survival mode won’t let them sustain anything except survival mode.
Remember that the cord has to be cut so you both can make it; this isn’t just about you, or just about them. Your lives, your roads, got you here. Your healing brought you here the same as your traumas have. Nobody’s at fault for their capabilities. Y’all have the skills and tools you do because you needed to survive. Doesn’t much matter who’s the avoider and who’s the hedonist. Couldn’t be of any bigger consequence than what kind of salad dressing you like. Your time has drawn to an end. That is where you must focus, dear heart, because looking backward will most certainly turn you into a shrieking mess. You’ll want back the little snatches of joy because deep down inside you never actually believed they were yours. The flickers feel less like a disaster is coming, more like you can control how invested you are. It’s a trick, baby: the crumbs don’t fill you, just keep you coming back for more and believing you can move on whenever you want. You don’t wanna move on, though. You wanna keep this going,
Remember that your closure is your responsibility. They don’t owe you an explanation of their attachment style, you’re not going to counseling together. Take them off your favorites list on your phone. You can’t watch them neglect themselves and then present a self “ready” to love and care for you. The two don’t go together. You, of all humans, should know that. It’s a lesson you’ve learned and relearned and learned and relearned and learned and … Nobody who’s naked can earnestly offer you the shirt off their back.
Remember that this is a natural course of emotion. There’s no predetermined grief period for this sort of thing. From the outside it may seem like y’all were good, but you know you spent a lot of time exaggerating so you wouldn’t feel embarrassed by how ill equipped they were to deal with you. They were never really your speed, even as you went your slowest to accommodate them,
Remember that this dynamic didn’t start with a romance; it’s inherited from all the power differentials that have shaped our world and your family in particular. You had friends like this long before you had a boo like this. You had a boss like this long before you had a friend like this. Your parents were your first disappointment of this kind. You watched. You absorbed so much without realizing it. One day it hit you like a clap of thunder that every pathetic bitch you ever shit talked (your mama, your sister, that girl from the job, so-and-so celebrity/ reality star/ internet persona) is you, and you are them. Easy to judge and pick them apart so you can pretend you don’t see yourself in them. Funny, that.
Remember that the only way forward is with the broken parts you have. You can’t leave those bits of yourself behind; when they heal you’ll build landmarks out of them. Until you do, you’ll have to lie next to them every night and wake with them each morning. They sometimes show up to interactions before the rest of you does. That’s the part that latched on and held onto this person so hard. The latching was so deep, so fast, and so thorough. By the time the rest of you caught up, it was time to let go.
So, you begin to do that. One finger, one tendon at a time. You put that lover, that friend, that parent, that sibling on a shelf. As you release your grip of them, you take a greater hold of yourself.
That’s how you release the ghost, the person who never really held you.