my dear son,
YYou think you have time. This is how it begins. You think there will always be another evening to explain yourself, another chance to turn the car around before it’s too late, another morning when you finally leave.
But you don’t.
Time shrinks, folds, dissolves. And the worst part is that you almost never notice until you’re inside the rubble, rebuilding the same walls that buried you the first time.
Boy, I saw you round the same pain, touching the edges as if checking its temperature. I know what that looks like. It is not a weakness. It’s not stupid either. It’s the terrible logic of the heart that insists that what almost destroyed you can still warm you. Those who do not know this kind of tension will never understand. They will tell you to leave, be happy it’s over, but they will tell you from dry land. They never lived inside the tides.
There is something magnetic about the places that hurt us. They hum at a certain pitch only we can hear. This is how the past calls you. You think you’re just going to see, to gauge how far you’ve come, to see if it still stings. But then, before you know it, you’re sitting down, taking off your coat, and the old silence wraps around you like a blanket you thought you’d throw away.
Each attachment carries its own aftertaste. Long after the body leaves, the soul lingers. You are protecting yourself from the one who broke you. You start talking in their voice, look in their eyes. You keep the hurt alive because letting it go feels like a grave—with you both the grief and the corpse.
People like to think that healing is a clear decision. It doesn’t. It’s slow. It is unequal. It is absurd. You carry your history the way a snail carries its home: not because you choose, but because it’s woven into your back.
When I was young, I mistakenly went for freedom. I thought that if I ran enough, changed cities, changed faces, even changed names, I could tear away the part of me that was bad for me. But truth followed like a breath. You can’t go beyond the shape you cast in the mirror.
The unknown scares us more than breaking our hearts. The devil we know, as they say, seems at least predictable. Familiar pain becomes his own refuge. There is order in it. You know the contours, where to step, which words will falter, which silences will stretch too long. New beginnings, in contrast, are chaos. They ask too much faith.
Hope is stubborn. Because standing in the rain long after moving indoors. We hope this time the story will take a turn. Whoever hurt us will know what they did. That a second chance will undo the first fall. It rarely happens, but that doesn’t stop us from rehearsing it.
There is also pride in going back. You say to yourself, “I’ll handle it better now. I’m wiser. I’ll stand where I knelt.” But what the mind tries to forget, the body remembers. One smell, one phrase, one tone – and you’re undone. I’ve been there more than once, watching myself repeat old failures with new words.
Attachment is not love. It’s older, more primitive. It’s the mind’s way of saying, “You survived it once, so it must be safe.” Comfort is sewn into danger; Memory becomes proof of patience. So when people judge those who return to their loneliness, their addiction, their unrequited love – they mistake survival for choice.
When you judge someone for going back on what hurt them, you reveal how little you know about the human tether. We don’t go back because we like the pain. We go back because pain, unlike peace, makes some sort of sense. You can measure it. You can touch it. You know its weight. The unknown has no such mercy.
Letting go feels like losing a limb. People say it gets easier with time, but they lie, or they forget. Scars healed, yes, but the phantom still hurts. The mind reaches for what is no longer there, and the emptiness that answers feels worse than the hurt.
That weakness must be forgiven. Vulnerability is just the name others give to the part of us that still believes. You will learn that faith is both your salvation and your pain. This is what makes everything human.
I used to think honesty meant cutting everything to the bone, tearing away all false comforts. Now I see that honesty also means admitting how deeply we want to be seen, even by those who have never learned to see.
So what do you do? Don’t be in a hurry to forget. You don’t force quit. You watch it slowly decay, like fruit drying on a windowsill. You can learn what made it taste so sweet and why you keep coming back after it’s gone. You learn your own patterns, how memory creates illusions, how hope can disguise itself as patience.
And when you finally leave—really leave—do it without grudges.
Hate binds you.
Get out with your silence.
Carry no mementos of regret, only the realization that you tried.
Anyone can: try, fail, try again, until trying becomes something sacred.
Do I regret those I went back to? Truth is complicated. I regret wasted years, yes, but not going back to myself. The wound had to be touched to know the truth. Sometimes only pain proves our existence.
Still, I’d spare you that lesson if I could. I will give you pure knowledge without blood and dust. But that’s not how it works. You have to step it yourself. Just promise me this: When you walk through that old door again — and you will once or twice — don’t lie to yourself about why.
Know that what you are looking for is not them, but the version of you who feels almost complete in their presence. That’s what you’re reaching for. It cannot be restored. Just understood.
When you finally understand, you stop circling the pain and begin to carry it as a kind of holiness, not to worship, remember: you lived, you wanted, you tried. This is what separates us from emptiness.
I am not speaking as a man who has overcome his past. I say this as someone who still sometimes sits in the ruins and hears the echoes of what once was. Even emptiness has a memory. Will learn to live next door.
And one day, perhaps silently, you’ll realize the pull is gone. You will stand where the door was and no longer need to walk through it. You wouldn’t call it a victory. You call it peace.
That night will come without ceremony. The world will look the same, but something within you will shift – just enough to breathe without their ghost pressing into your chest.
When that happens, write me. Tell me how it feels. Tell me if silence sounds like freedom at last, or just another kind of noise.
Until then, walk slowly through your repetitions. They are not your failure, just a very long exit step.
father
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This post was Previously published at medium.com.
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Photo credit: Gabriela Claire Marino is at Unsplash
