AGAIN

People come into our lives and some are bound to leave. It’s a reality we’ve all had to deal with. So many songs, novels and movies have been made about this. Enough Thought Catalog, Elite Daily and Buzzfeed articles about letting go and moving on attest to this. There are times when people really have to go.

Though I am not that old yet, it seems that I’ve racked up enough number of years in my life to see some people come back. More than a few incidents have led me to completely agree that some people do returb in their own time. So when someone on Facebook posted this J.K. Rowling quote: “Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect.” All I could say to it was, RIGHT ON. 

Having been on the receiving end of such “resurrections,” I’ve come to believe, that as hard as it is to let go of people and to learn not to wait for them, being open to the possibility of them coming back and seeing them do so are just as difficult. 

Imagine this. Enough time has passed for the hurt to go away, for forgiveness to take the place of anger. At this point, you can already wholeheartedly believe that all that confusion, pain and sadness happened for a reason – that all of it has indeed made you stronger, as the cliché goes. There are no more hard feelings or any feelings at all. You are a different person now. You have learned to carry on with your life without the presence of someone who used to be around so often, without waiting or hoping for a return.

Then BOOM. The person comes back with a proposition: a clean slate, a fresh start.

A decade or so may have passed and you are both functioning with the full knowledge that things cannot and will never be the same again, that you both cannot play the same roles you did before – letting someone in again is still iffy. Saying yes to another chance, to me, is a bigger risk than the first time I said yes to it. Because the second time is often an ultra-conscious choice with historical data attached to it.

How on earth do you decide?

As is true with a lot of things at this point in my life, it’s one big gray area. No ready answer is available. Really, some people need to be kept out of our lives. “Toxic” was not a term created from myths. Many of us have to learn how to stop subjecting ourselves to self-inflicted pain. But others just may deserve another shot.

And if I were to be truly honest, I would want to keep saying yes. It is the acknowledgement that I cannot always take the easy way out and brush people off (heaven knows how difficult relating to people can be). It’s knowing that if I were to make my life story worth anything, I have to take risks. More importantly, it’s a show of trust in others, myself and life, in general. It’s a declaration that I have enough faith that things may be different this time, and if all this fails yet again, I will know how to handle myself and it will be just another way to grow -- as cheesy as this sounds.

All I can really think of is this: how else can we know if anything’s worth the risk when we don’t give it the chance to manifest its worth? 

Note from writer: As an exercise, replace the word “people” with any of the following: friends, lovers, relatives, places, jobs, things, events, circumstances, or whatever is applicable to your life.