Per Dimenticare

[Per Dimenticare= Italian for: [In Order] to Forget You]

By: Gabriela Yareliz

It has been a happy set of months, where I have been watching friends’ wedding videos, attending weddings and finding out about new life chapters beginning. It has filled me with so much happiness for those friends; those I love so much.

In the midst of all these new beginnings, I couldn’t help but think about how things were at one point. I was thinking of conversations I would have with these friends; things we went through.

Many of my friends married people we all didn’t know existed two to three years ago. Some moved to cities they never would have thought they’d move to. Life is like that. Magical. Unexpected.

Our first kisses, our first jobs, our first loves– none of those quite made it up to this point. I know mine didn’t. Life spins like the planet we are on. It changes. And then, it stops.

It stops for a split minute for us to gather our bearings and hold hands with whomever we want to move forward with. It stops, giving us enough time to open a map to trace the new direction in which we are headed. Then, a new chapter begins, with a new setting or with a new person at our side. And commitment makes it everything. We continue to evolve and grow, but there is a person or place we call home.

If we were to stay nostalgic for what life was or “could have been,” we’d all live heartbroken and in some weird false world of illusions. Many of us who are starting new chapters, we had our fair share of heartbreak. Someone who we loved smashed our heart to pieces. That person made us cry– you know the type of crying, the crouching-down-on-the-floor-in-a-corner, hand-over-the-mouth crying. We felt the sting of betrayal and rejection. Years. Plans. Invested emotions and more– all gone.

But then, we got up.

We dusted ourselves off from the corner where we cried for long enough, we glued our hearts back together, and we stepped out courageously.

And then, we met that person who made us believe in a love that was deeper than what we had felt before. We believed in a life that we didn’t know was possible. We believed, again. And some of us realized we had never believed at all, before now.

This is an open letter to the “exes” who broke our hearts, but then, now they spend years reading our blogs and looking us up on LinkedIn. We know, but you see, while you left the place where we came together, we left, too. The only difference was we didn’t turn around to look back.

We are happy.

We are falling in love.

We are enjoying life.

We are growing wiser.

We are becoming more beautiful.

We are moving.

We are succeeding.

We are getting married.

We are living the life God knew we wanted that we wouldn’t have had with someone who only thinks of himself.

May you find happiness, despite always remembering what you could have had but don’t have.

At one point, we feared we would never heal from the hurt you caused, but we did. And now, we choose not to forget you, to remind ourselves of how good God was to spare us.

And you can’t forget us.

Keep watching. There is more amazing stuff coming.