Turn the page

2 years. 700 odd days. It’s time to turn the page.

Flashbacks stop you from moving on to the next chapter, relentlessly reminding you of the highs.

The mercuric lows come howling at you in a flash of a moment to bring any remorse to a screeching halt.

Guilt is one hell of a bitch.

It has the inane ability to make you question your life choices. Especially the ones that you were so confident and sure about.

Did you snatch away a future from someone? One that you envisioned yourselves in for the rest of your lives together? One that you ended because you couldn’t see yourself breaking down, piece by piece? One that was shattered by fragile egos? One that could have been fixed? One where you laughed like a little child and cried like a baby, all in one breath?

It’s a never-ending rut of mind-bending ‘what if’ questions. It keeps you up all night.

Then come the life lessons.

The constant self-banter. Another way of reassuring yourself that it was the right call.

Everything happens for a reason- Who on earth is going to tell you the reason?

Whatever happens, it happens for the best- whom are we talking about? Who got the shorter end of the stick?

You dodged a bullet- is this a Netflix show where we are being chased by criminals?

The list is endless. It changes to suit the current mood. In the passive-aggressive narrative, you secretly believe that you’re completely okay with the turn of events and wouldn’t change a thing in the timeline. Sometimes, it sounds too good to be true. Too wise to be real. That you would willingly undergo something all over again, knowing how it would change the very core of who you are. Then again, when you think about it, you would do it all over again in a heartbeat.

The healing process should come with a disclaimer.

This could take anywhere between 3 months to infinity. While we are at it, let’s throw in a trigger warning. Any word, song or coffee shop may trigger a ‘time machine’ moment with no access to a safe word.

You can go down the rabbit hole of reliving the entire chronology of events through photographs and mental conversations. Chemical changes in your brain have altered memories over time; either dulled down or blown up to larger-than-life moments. The way we replay movie dialogues in our head and juxtapose them into our daily talk, to a point where they don’t sound anywhere close to the original dialogue. The good is glorified, the not-so-good (go on, say toxic) is villainized.

There are days you declare to yourself, you’ve healed and you can finally stop the running background song that plays in your head on loop. Then, there are days when you feel like the gnawing void that you’re experiencing will never ever be filled and maybe this is what the rest of your life looks like. The best days are when you softly whisper blessings and messages of love into the wind, believing that if you are evolved enough to rise above everything and communicate in an alternate realm, you have definitely healed.

2 years. 700 odd nights. Maybe, it really is time to turn the page on the most ecstatic, yet tumultuous chapter of your life.