Sunset

There was no one moment.

It was a fading out of sorts. There was no light switch that made me fall out of love. No flipping of a switch and shutting off of emotions. It was, instead, rather like a sunset: a love that once was bright and visible to everyone around it, slowly faded until it was dark. Until it was buried somewhere where no one could see it, and then it disappeared. Yet it was beautiful.

It was a beautiful sunset.

Falling out of love with someone you never should have loved is, in hindsight, a beautiful thing. The sun, after it sets, at first cannot see the beauty of what it has created. But a new day always starts, and as the days pass and nights fall, it becomes easier to see why the sun set in the first place.

And yet, if there was one moment that I would change about that beautiful sunset, it would be the words spoken to the earth as the sun left it for good.

The words spoken were small in number. They left so much to the imagination, so much to others to fill in. The words accepted what was given to them, the harshness that a polluted earth threw in their face as the sun left. That harshness was remembered, over and over, by a sick and saddened sun.

So if there was one moment I would change, it would be to have said more.

To have explained the hurt and the pain that was inside, to explain that it was something that couldn't be undone and that was simply deepened by my silence. I would change the moment that I made the conscious decision to walk away without explaining myself. The moment that I decided to let someone else have the final say in a chapter of my life.

I write my own stories. I write my own life. And I allowed someone else to write the ending of one of my books. A giant part of my life, gone, forgotten, and ended by someone else's pen.

Literally.

I would stand up for myself. I would change the fact that I didn't realize that I had to take care of myself before I took care of him. I would change the fact that I spared his feelings instead of my own. I would change the fact that I allowed someone else to walk away from me with the idea that they had done something right, when they had done something terribly cruel.

The sun sheds light on the earth. Without the sun, the earth will survive, if only for a limited period of time before it becomes desolate. But the sun can stand on its own. The sun is strong, and beautiful, and will set on many other planets before it has run its course.