If you keep looking in the rearview, you’ll crash

I canceled dinner with Jim tonight.

When I canceled, I had a legitimate reason – Sean gave me a pretty bad cold. I didn’t feel like driving an hour to have an awkward dinner when I was already sick.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized…what purpose would it serve?

Honestly. Jim and I don’t talk on anything remotely near a frequent basis. When we do talk, I’m the one chasing him down to speak to him. I was the one who chased him down for dinner.

I’m done chasing.

Everything that needs to be said has been said. There is nothing for me to gain by re-hashing our short-lived and disastrous liaisons. Too many people were way too hurt by our actions. Too many things that I am not at all proud of were done.

That will never be changed. It’s done, it’s written in stone, it is in the past and I can’t fix it.

But I can control how I behave now.

I have to stop running to him every time Sean and I have a problem. I have to start trying to figure out if he still loves me. I have to take his silence on our progressing relationship as having no meaning.

Because in the end, it really doesn’t matter anymore.

Our fucked-up relationship ended. It ended quite a while ago. In my heart, I know this. Even more than knowing, I feel it. I’m clinging to someone who doesn’t deserve my time or attention, and someone who doesn’t really seem to want it.

In the meantime, I have friends who I love and who love me that I barely see enough of. Yet, I waste my time on people I mean nearly nothing to.

No thanks.

We don’t even know each other any more. I’m such a fundamentally different person, and he seems to be as well. That chapter in my life is over. I need to stop trying to flip the pages back.

I need to keep moving forward.

It’s scary, to leave someone you loved so deeply behind. But I know it’s the right thing to do. Not because I’m afraid I still have feelings for him or because I want to be with him. Neither of those are the case.

It’s right because holding on to this awkwardness is hurting more than helping.

I’d rather remember loving him happily than be forced to remember this stage of our relationship, where the hope and spark have died and we are left with nothing to say.

I’d rather walk forward with the knowledge that what’s behind is resolved and over, and in spite of that those lessons are still guiding me.

I don’t need him any more. I can even admit that I don’t want him any more. Not even in a platonic capacity. I’m not even sure we could function like that.

I’m letting him go.

There isn’t going to be an extended goodbye. There won’t be a teary explanation. There will just be our two paths separating further, until we speak even less than we do now. Until we are just fond memories for each other. Until we are that question "Whatever happened to…?"