Of Bridges Burned and Small Hopes

So I was going to post a silly post about video games today, but there’s something else that I found I really needed to write about today. I recently made a mistake, and I unintentionally hurt a friend, and it kills me because it’s something that would have so easily been prevented if I had just listened to myself and written back. But I didn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to take the fifteen minutes out of my day to sit down and just write. It honestly never occurred to me that I could hurt someone so deeply by doing nothing. And yet here we are.

I’m the type of person who doesn’t ever like to see someone hurting (although, to be fair, that really is most people), and if I see someone hurting, I immediately want to fix it. I want to run to that person’s side and bundle them in a thousand blankets, make them tea, and hold them close while murmuring that it’s all going to be okay. That “the sun will come out tomorrow” and life will get better. But I can’t do that in this instance because they live far too far away, and I’m the one that caused the hurt. And it kills me. I’ve spent the last week and a half meticulously picking my words and attempting to compose a message to them in a way that gets across exactly how I feel to them, but words fall short sometimes. But in the end, I have written back, and I have to accept that that’s all that I can do at this moment. That sometimes, the final outcome isn’t my decision, and that whether or not they accept my apology and give me another chance, both our lives will go on.

You see, what I’m slowly learning is that I can’t be there for everyone (though God knows that won’t stop me from trying). Both my heart and mind are starting to understand that you can’t always fix every problem, and that sometimes a bridge has been burned too badly to ever be repaired, and sometimes you may just be the person who dropped the match. People come into our lives on a constant basis. Some of those people stay forever, and your interactions will be up and down and will help the both of you grow in ways you never knew you needed to grow. But a lot of people will come into our lives, only to end up leaving after a while. Yet, just because they aren’t around for as long doesn’t make their impact any less. Sometimes a person will enter your life for a period of time, and completely change the way that you think or help you to see objects in a new light and it will be wonderful and amazing, and then suddenly they’ll be gone. And while you want to chase after them and stay by their side forever, sometimes it just isn’t possible, and you have to move on. And it will hurt, oh my god will it hurt, but you have to let them go, and realize that just because they’re gone, that doesn’t mean that they made any less of an impact on your life. They’ve changed your life in some way, however small that change may end up being, it’s still change. And you have to trust that the change you’ve made in their life has been for the better, and that they’ll be just fine without you. Ultimately, all you can do is wish them the best, let them go, and learn that the world will keep spinning.

I realize how vague and messy this entry has been, but I’ve been crying the entire time I was writing, and I can’t give any details on what happened because it would mean giving information on a friend that I don’t feel I should share.