You can’t take everyone with you.
Let’s just start there. Let’s carve that into the cheap wood of the bar right now. You can’t drag every goddamn corpse from your past into the future. It’s not a cruise ship, this life; it’s a goddamn lifeboat in a storm, and you’re already taking on water.
Not everything you love is meant to stay.
Some people, some forces, they come into your life like a goddamn demolition crew. They’re not there to build a house with you. They’re there to tear the old one down. They reshape you with a sledgehammer, they burn away the bullshit with a flamethrower, and when the job is done, they just… dissolve. They turn to ash and blow away on the wind.
And your stupid, sentimental mind will go hunting for answers. Your soft, bleeding heart will reach for the glue and the twine, trying to put the pieces back together. But something deeper than both, something down in the gut, in the bone, it already knows. It recognizes that a job, once completed, is done. It has its own intelligence. It feels like gravity.
A relationship that once moved in the same orbit as you is now just a dead star, being pulled in a different direction by a different darkness. Something that once mirrored you perfectly, that showed you a part of yourself you needed to see, has now completed its reflection. The mirror is cracked.
And the part that’s exhausting you, the part that’s grinding you down to a nub? It’s not the change itself. It’s the part of you that’s already been through the fire, the part that’s already transformed, that’s still trying to pretend it hasn’t. It’s the part of you that keeps putting on the old, ill-fitting suit of a man you used to be. It’s the part of you that keeps swimming against a current that has already changed its goddamn direction.
Resisting change is like bracing your body against the ocean, as if your own stupid, personal preference could stop the goddamn waves. But it’s not personal. It’s pattern. It’s the way life, that big, beautiful, and completely indifferent sonofabitch, rearranges itself through you.
Your reality changes shape as your perception expands. Friendships, relationships, the old, comfortable versions of yourself, they all collapse. Not from failure. But because they’ve served their fucking purpose. Like everything that’s alive, they die. They transform. They begin again.
Not every ending needs a villain. Sometimes, a thing just runs its course. Sometimes, the bottle is just empty. And that loud, roaring absence you’re left with? That’s just the sound of the radio recalibrating, a blast of static because the frequency has changed and you’re not tuned in to the old station anymore.
What you’re calling “loss” might just be the sound of your own soul finally outgrowing the goddamn cage you kept it in.
And that next cycle, that next song, that next beautiful, ugly, and completely necessary chapter of your life, it won’t find its rhythm in you until you unclench your goddamn fists from the last one. You have to let it go. You have to grieve it, you have to drink to it, you have to burn it down to the goddamn ground.
Not everything is meant to last.
But you didn’t lose love.
Because love isn’t the thing that stays or goes. Love isn’t a person, or a house, or a memory. Love is the hard, ugly, and beautiful truth that remains in your gut, even while everything else is changing, burning, and turning to ash. It’s the scar tissue that reminds you that you were in a real goddamn fight.
You can’t take everyone with you.
And thank God for that.
