The Process of Moving On

Moving on is a gradual process. It takes months and years. It’s the compilation of a hundred events and decisions, both huge and minuscule, with maddeningly varying degrees of significance. Sometimes it’s burning piles of clothes, sometimes it’s crying in the bathroom at work, sometime it’s melodramatic walks on windy beaches. It can be deafening music in crowded bars; it can be deafening silence in empty houses. Wild adventures in new cities or the excruciating mediocrity of everyday life.

It’s a process, and processes have clear and defined beginnings, middles and endings.

You think the beginning is the worst part, but eventually it’s the middle that feels like it’s going to destroy you. People tell you it gets easier every day, and they are wrong. In reality each day is not easier or harder, it’s only different. Grief and hatred aren’t happy bedfellows, and the oscillation between fury and bereavement is enough to make you feel seasick, sat on top of a swinging pendulum of two of the most frustrating human emotions to safely navigate.

When it finally ends, it ends in a split second. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it magical moment with the sudden realisation that it’s over. The final ending, the end of all the miniature endings, doesn’t come with pain or mourning, or elation or mania, it’s the total absence of feeling and emotion.

It is the sensation of getting into bed after the longest day of your life, feet throbbing from having walked miles without knowing your destination, tongue fuzzy with dehydration, head still swimming with the cloudy memories of everything you saw and heard and felt, sleep coming all too quickly, your body giving into exhaustion before you’ve even had time to process where you’ve been.

As for me, having a tattoo is the greatest diversion of emotional pain. And helps a lot in moving on... : )