Almost exactly two years ago, I was about to post this video. I know that because this has been sitting on my “Saved Drafts” since October 2009.
I listened to this song again today, and realized it didn’t mean the same thing it did two years ago. It didn’t hurt. It didn’t make me feel numb inside. I waited with bated breath for the shattering of my heart as I flinched against painful memories that were sure to bombard me. Instead, the entire song went by and I was perfectly fine. In fact, I played it over. I scrambled to find some kind of meaning to the song. But I felt…nothing. Maybe a little bit of pity for the girl that I had been when I had my heart broken. Maybe a little bit of cynicism for what the words used to mean to me. But I didn’t feel any pain or sorrow or anger.
I smiled at that realization, because it means that I have truly grown.
Sure, maybe it took about two years. And sure, he’s still in there occasionally popping back into my life (and pissing me off).
But I have moved on.
Time really does heal all things. I didn’t believe it back when I first started this blog, its html codes bursting with angst and pain, when everyone told me that “this too shall pass.” It didn’t feel like it EVER would. I kept waking up day after day with that sharp stab of pain in a part of me that seemed so empty and hollow. How could it hurt when I no longer had a heart? But those were the days when the hurt was fresh.
Time has done its work. It has patched up a wound that I didn’t think would ever stop bleeding. Sure, time didn’t necessarily take away the scars. I am far more cautious and a lot more cynical about falling head over heels in love, but I don’t hurt anymore. I’m not even angry anymore. I’m simply…done.
I look back at those memories and cherish them for the good times and learn from the terrible times.
I feel like I’ve really accomplished something in healing. I feel like I’m free.
The song is right, everything changes. Thank God things change for the better, too.
Given the chance to turn back time and change things, I don’t think I would take it. I think I’m a much happier person on my own now and I don’t need the kind of blindness that I once had. I was so innocent and naive back then. I really did believe that if you loved someone hard enough, it would solve everything. I believed that if I could become what he wished I were, I could make him love me. I tore myself to pieces trying to figure out who he wanted me to be. In the end, I lost myself.
In the last couple of years, I have learned so much, grown so much into my own that I don’t think I would ever give that up…not even for a chance to save what was. I think because in the back of my mind, in the darkest echoes in my heart, I know I couldn’t save anything. The mistakes were made too early in that relationship that it defined the relationship. If that was what that relationship meant…it couldn’t, shouldn’t, be saved. It would have destroyed us both.
But I loved him. That is the only thing I was ever certain of in that relationship. I loved him with that blinding rush of feeling that completely takes over and changes you. I don’t know if I will ever feel that again, and I don’t know if I ever want to feel that again. I will always remember it, though. It will forever be the feeling I will measure everything against. Just as the level of despair I felt at that time will also be the measure I use to see how far I have fallen.
I played the song again.
Everything changes. And that’s a good thing.
Tags: Everything Changes, gratitude, learn, love, nBF, Staind
