“I don’t wanna take it anymore. I think I’m ready to stop.”
Yesterday, I sat in my doctor’s office and said the words out loud: “I don’t wanna take it anymore. I think I’m ready to stop.”
For nearly a decade and a half, a tiny pill has been my quiet companion. I first welcomed it into my life in 2011, during a season when my heart was shattered so violently I didn’t think I would survive the debris. The prescription was a life raft. It pulled me out of the drowning waves of grief and placed on a still, flat shore.
But over the years, I realized something. That flat shore was a desert.
The medicine didn't just mute the grief, it muted everything. It was an emotional anesthetic, keeping the sharp edges of the world at bay. I survived, but I was living in a climate-controlled room. No freezing winters, but no scorching, beautiful summers either. Just a perpetual, gray autumn. I didn’t get the chance to feel any real pain, but in exchange, I forgot how to truly feel joy.
Recently, the person who held the largest space in my heart walked out of my life. He is still out there, breathing the same air under the same sky, but we no longer speak. There is no communication. A bridge was silently dismantled, leaving only an empty expanse of water between us.
Normally, this is the kind of devastating shift that would make someone cling to their armor. But instead, it woke me up.
Because from the very beginning, what we had was real. I want to acknowledge, without any filters, how deeply and truly loved I felt by him. He didn't just walk into my life; he shook it awake. He taught me what it actually means to be alive, to feel alive, and to have the bravery to finally embrace... well, everything. Before him, I was just going through the motions. With him, every nerve ending fired. There was this raw, rare, undeniable genuineness in how we held each other. It wasn't a shadow or a passing phase; it was a profound, authentic love that anchored my soul and dared me to feel things I had spent years running from.
I looked at the silence between us and realized I couldn't let myself freeze over that memory. The armor was doing its job too well. It was keeping the sorrow of his absence from reaching me, but by locking out the grief, it was also erasing the reality of how beautifully he had taught me to live.
To refuse to feel the pain of losing someone is to pretend they never mattered. And he mattered. The love we shared was the truest, most life-giving thing I have ever known.
I used to think love was only supposed to be the warm, golden hours, the laughter, the safety, the quiet Sunday mornings. But love is not a single, happy note played on repeat.
Love is a symphony, and a symphony requires the minor keys. It requires the deep, rumbling bass of longing, the sharp violin shrieks of heartbreak, and the heavy silence of pause. If we mute the sad instruments, we ruin the entire song.
The anesthetic kept me safe, but it made me a ghost in my own story, erasing the memory of how warm that love actually was.
Grief is just love with nowhere to go. If I refuse to feel the grief, I am refusing the love itself.
So, under my doctor's supervision, I began the slow process of stepping down from the pedestal of numbness. I wanted the weather back. I wanted to feel the biting cold of this loss, because it proves that the warmth he showed me was real.
And then, the dam finally broke.
It started with a single, hot tear, and then the floodgates burst.
I’ve started to cry the tears that have been stuck in my tear ducts for almost a decade and a half. They were silent, frozen, and patiently waiting in the dark. Now, they are finally tasting the air. It feels less like crying and more like a jailbreak as if every unshed tear from 2010 to this very moment was suddenly granted its freedom.
As they spill over, I realize they aren't just tears of sadness. They are the physical proof of my return to the living. They are the tears of a heart that remembers what it is like to be genuinely, beautifully loved the tears of someone who is finally brave enough to feel.
We think we are "getting over" things when we don't cry, but the body remembers every debt we owe to grief. Every heartache I brushed off, every silent departure I shrugged through, and the colossal, quiet loss of the person I loved most, it was all stored up, waiting for the interest to be paid.
Each tear is a heavy word I wasn’t allowed to speak for fifteen years.
Each sob is a breath I’ve been holding since the armor went on.
The pain is sharp, but it is clean. It is the honest echo of a love that was entirely real.
They say tears wash the eyes so we can see the world more clearly. Right now, my vision is blurry, but my heart has never felt more awake.
It hurts. It stings to let the blood rush back into frozen limbs. And as I sit here, letting fifteen years of grief wash down my face, I feel broken, ofcourse, but I also feel whole. Because to feel this level of sorrow means I was lucky enough to feel a love that made me truly alive.
For the first time in a decade and a half, I feel entirely, human again.
I know I’m not home yet. I know the road ahead is long, and the truth is, to truly feel "home" again, I would have to travel far back through the years to meet him once more if the universe persists and ever allows our paths to cross again.
But I am done hiding in the shadows of a chemical truce. I don't want to swallow my feelings in half-milligrams anymore. I don't want the safety of the numb. I want the storm, the sun, the quiet, and the ache. I am ready to close the medicine cabinet, open the windows, and let the wind in.
amandla
2087
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