Its been a week ...

No poems. No tears. No stories. Just the collateral damage.

I’ve been sitting with the question of whether the end justifies the means — whether the greater good is sometimes simply freedom. Freedom from something that became suffocating. Freedom from a dynamic that no longer served a coherent future. Freedom from the daily court of two articulate debaters talking and talking, circling the same trial that never ended.

I understand it, because I felt it too. The endless bickering. The longing to be heard. The silent, unsaid things that grew heavier with time.

And yet, in life, we are not judged by the journey. We are judged by the final act.

The gunshot that ends a life. The last drink that destroys a family. The moment of weakness that betrays true love. The single act that becomes the whole story.

Relationships are no different. The ending becomes the verdict.

We are all heroines in our own stories and villains in someone else’s. The he‑said, she‑said doesn’t matter because, in the end, everything is ashes. The hearts closest to me understand the reasons — they know the truth of what led here — but they are hurt by the cowardice in the final moment. Those closest to him may agree with his choice, may see the hardness of long‑distance love, may justify the exit.

We can script any narrative in any direction. Humans are experts at defending their own endings.

Healing is a strange thing

Anger keeps you stubborn. Tears set you free. Love and forgiveness heal.

And in my grief, I defend his actions over my pain because love is a choice.

Not because they didn’t hurt. Not because they were right. But because that is how I choose to heal — through understanding, not bitterness.

We repeat cycles we promise never to repeat. Maybe that’s human nature — hope, peace, the want for love. I will never grow harder or colder. Maybe love will always be elusive. Maybe it won’t.

But I know this: Life is the broken heart. Passage is forgiveness. Happiness is the love we keep choosing.

My only ask is simple: When you choose to leave someone, leave them with the same love you found them in on the very first date. I gambled the moment I saw you, I knew you would be my forever or my biggest heartbreak. I was warned too - and yet I touched. So many truths I find in the words of the men in my life - I never listen, until I taste it, I see it, I smell it, I experience it, I hear it - I will never take another person's experience as my own. Because I may be the exception and not the norm. Isn't that what love and life is.

Leaving is part of life

We leave home. We leave our parents. We leave relationships. We leave jobs. We get left by lovers, by children growing into their own lives, by friends who drift into new seasons.

Leaving is inevitable. But it never has to be unkind. Never disrespectful. Never dark.

The wound is never in the leaving. It’s in the way a soul chooses to walk away.