People like to say time heals everything, but the truth is, time only teaches you how to carry the weight more gracefully. It doesnât take the ache away. It just folds it deeper inside you until it becomes a quiet part of who you are.
Letting go is not a single act. Itâs a slow, trembling process of unlearning the version of your life that had them in it.
It starts with the small things.
The texts you stop waiting for. The places you stop visiting. The songs you skip because they know too much about you.
You tell yourself youâre fine, that youâre past it, but then a scent, a name, a song drags you back to the same room where you swore youâd never return.
And thatâs when you realize itâs not about missing them anymore.
Itâs about missing who you were when they loved you.
Because love changes you. It rewires your days, it alters your voice, it teaches you a rhythm that feels like home. And when they leave, they donât just take themselves with them; they take the version of you that existed in that shared world.
You lose the laughter that used to fill your nights.
You lose the warmth of knowing that someone chose you, even when the world didnât.
You lose that quiet certainty that comes from belonging to something bigger than yourself.
And so, the hardest part of letting go isnât the silence, itâs learning to live without the reflection of yourself that only existed when they were there.
You start to understand that grief is not loud. Itâs not crying on the floor or screaming into the night.
Grief is remembering their voice while standing in the cereal aisle. Itâs typing their name out of habit and deleting it before you press send. Itâs catching yourself smiling at a memory and then remembering youâre not supposed to anymore.
Itâs subtle. Itâs cruel. Itâs endless.
And yet, somewhere inside that ache, something begins to shift.
You start to see that love doesnât vanish; it only changes form. It becomes silence instead of conversation, memory instead of presence, acceptance instead of desire.
Letting go is not about erasing someone from your story. Itâs about accepting that they were never meant to stay for the entire book.
Some people are chapters, not the ending. They come to teach you, to awaken something inside you, and then they leave.
And maybe the lesson was never about love itself, but about who you become when itâs gone.
Because love isnât just about holding on, itâs also about knowing when to release.
Itâs realizing that sometimes, the most loving thing you can do is to stop fighting whatâs already over.
Letting go means forgiving yourself for the things you said and the things you didnât.
It means forgiving them, even if they never asked you to.
It means forgiving the universe for letting two people meet at the wrong time.
Itâs not neat. Itâs not poetic.
Sometimes itâs just standing at your window at 2 a.m., whispering their name into the dark, knowing itâs the last time you ever will.
Youâll think about all the versions of yourself that existed with them, the one who waited, the one who hoped, the one who begged the universe to make it right, and youâll learn to thank each one before you let them go too.
And one day, youâll wake up and realize you didnât think about them first thing in the morning.
Youâll make coffee, and itâll taste like coffee, not like memory.
Youâll walk past their street, and your chest wonât tighten.
Youâll hear their favourite song, and it wonât break you.
Thatâs how healing happens quietly, without warning.
Not in grand gestures, but in tiny mercies.
In the way your heart learns to stop searching for their face in a crowd.
In the way you start to build new days that no longer orbit around them.
And maybe one day, years from now, youâll see them again.
And it wonât hurt. Youâll smile not out of longing, but out of gratitude.
Because now, youâll understand that love doesnât always mean forever. Sometimes it just means once.
Once deeply. Once beautifully. Once enough to change you.
And maybe thatâs all it was meant to be.
Because the truth is, you never really get over someone.
You just learn how to live without the version of life you imagined with them.
You learn how to make peace with the fact that some doors close, not because you werenât enough, but because itâs time to walk through another one.
You learn that the heart is a traveller, it carries fragments of people it once loved, but it also keeps room for more.
And slowly, almost imperceptibly, you begin to feel lighter.
Not because youâve forgotten them, but because you finally understand that loving and letting go can coexist.
That love doesnât lose its meaning just because it ended.
That what was real will always remain real, even if it no longer exists.
And that you are allowed to outgrow what once felt like home.
So, how do you let go of someone?
You do it one heartbeat at a time.
One morning at a time.
One quiet act of forgiveness at a time.
Until one day, you find yourself standing in the sunlight
and realize that you survived something you once thought would destroy you.
And in that moment, youâll know:
Letting go wasnât losing them.
It was finding yourself again.
If these words stayed with you for a while, and youâd like to support me while I keep writing more of these reflections, you can buy me a coffee here: Buy me a coffeeâđ€
I also wrote a little book called âFor All the Wrong Reasons.â
Itâs about a girl who moves to a small autumn town called Maplewood⊠only to find herself falling for her roommateâs boyfriend. Itâs a story about wanting someone you probably shouldnât, and all the messiness that follows.
If youâre a member of Hasifâs Porchlight Club ($3/month), you can read it for free.
Or, you can grab it on its own for $5.
âLetting go is not about erasing someone from your story. Itâs about accepting that they were never meant to stay for the entire book.
Some people are chapters, not the ending. They come to teach you, to awaken something inside you, and then they leaveâ - this hits hard as Iâm currently going through this right now
And 7 months later theyâre now engaged to another