At some point, you accept the changes in you life as fact and you move on, expecting what's true in the present to be true for the future. Under the guise of mental health, you take those unfinished pieces of history and place them in a box somewhere in the back of your head.

Or in a box under your bed.

It's what I've done all my life.

I experience the terrible pain of rejection and loss to such an intense degree, that I nearly die every time it happens. And when it seems that I've tortured myself enough, I shut that part of me down and let it rot away.

I can see now that every time I've done that, I've grown a tiny bit more distant from the world. Each time I burn off one of these cancerous wounds I become a little bit more reluctant to expose myself again. In the interests of mental health, I make a constant unconscious effort to detach myself from anyone I might grow to care about.

I am older, colder, and wiser...but no better from the journey.

So you take the memories, the unfinished business and all the unresolved emotion embodied in a person and you let go of it. You accept that you're never going to see that person again and that your life will go on without them.

But you never prepare yourself for the possibility that she might come back.