I had an epiphany. No, the clouds didn’t open for me, there wasn’t a magical shimmer surrounding the moment, I was just sitting on my bedroom floor in front of a full-length mirror, munching on a bag of crisps and applying my foundation. Sitting between a bottle of Huda Faux Filter and the Salt and Vinegar Hunky Dorys, was my phone – opened on his message, two big familiar blue ticks staring me in the face.
Blue ticks that I curse anytime they are associated with him. Here I was again, he didn’t reply, and I felt like shit. A very full-coveraged piece of shit, but shit nonetheless. And then, something happened that had never happened before – I didn’t give out about him in the group chat, I wasn’t tempted to fire my phone at the wall, instead, I sat with the feeling. I stared at myself in the mirror and brought my focus back to myself. Was I really allowing myself to be here… again? Torturing myself because he had no desire to talk to me? Filling my day with the cold of ghostly blue ticks? Was I really shocked that he had revealed himself to be the person that he had always shown me he was?
I wasn’t over it, but I couldn’t stay there anymore. He hadn’t even responded, so this wasn’t about him anymore, it was about me. It was about the woman staring back at me in the mirror who kept mentally going over somebody who may or may not have ever been thinking about her. Something lifted off of my shoulders in that moment – acceptance. The acceptance that I could care about somebody but that didn’t mean they had to want me in their life, no matter the chapters we had crafted together before now.
He stayed the same to me, as he always did – I still wanted the best for him, but something within me changed. I wanted the best for me too. I didn’t need to announce it, I didn’t want a medal or recognition, I just felt free for the first time in what felt like forever and a little longer. Something lifted off my shoulders, and my inner power softly landed back onto them. There was no great shudder, no intense trail of destruction. I took a deep breath, applied a little blush, a soft highlight, closed WhatsApp, put the swirling emotions between us to bed, threw my high heels on, and proceeded to live my life.
