the fine print I had been hiding from myself
For about a year I had been telling anyone who asked — and telling myself, more often — that I had let her go.
Here is what I now think I actually meant:
I let you go,
as long as you stay mine
in some invisible way.
That is not release. That is a longer leash with better branding.
You can test it, and the test is unpleasant. It is not did you stop contacting her. It is: what happens in your chest when she is happy in a way that has nothing to do with you? If the answer is anything other than good, then the release was conditional, and a conditional release is not one.
Mine was extremely conditional. Chapter seventeen is the receipt.
trying, its not a chain, not a lock, not even a weight. its opening my hand, even when they shake, letting you walk into the wind without a rope on your waist... that isn't holding. it's offering.
what releasing actually includes
Here is the part I did not want and could not get around.
If I release someone, they are actually free. Not free within a range I find acceptable. Free — including free to choose somebody who is not me. Including free to be better off. Including free to not think about this as much as I do.
If any of those outcomes is intolerable to me, then what I have is not love with open hands. It is ownership with good manners.
Feeling
I hate this. All of this. I would like there to be a version where letting go is noble and then rewarded.
Fact
There isn't. That is the version where you let go in order to get something, which is the same grip with a longer time horizon.
Prayer
Then help me want her to be well in a way that does not require me to be in the room for it.
What I learned later
That prayer took months to become true and it is not permanently true. It is a thing I have to mean again, on purpose, at intervals.
not the cliché
There is a sentence about this that everyone knows and I refuse to write, because it is used almost exclusively by people who have not done it, as a way of sounding wise about a thing they are actually still gripping.
What I will say is the smaller, less quotable version:
Letting go is not loving someone less. The quantity does not change. What changes is the shape — from a closed hand to an open one, holding exactly the same thing, with the enormous difference that it can now leave.
that isn't holding.
it's offering.
Everyone in this story except me is unnamed — her, a friend, my father, someone. It is my story to tell and theirs to keep. Names are not hidden in the page source either; they were never written down.