The Paper

It's just a piece of paper. 📝It really doesn't mean much but it means everything.  There have been 3 years of cat and mouse. Three years of random text messages, sporadic emails and silence. More silence than anything.  When you move, I move like a chess match. Each move strategically played.

No one wants to be first. Someone has to be first. The unspoken conversation that hung in the air like a thick fog...dense...hard to wade through....because no one wants to go first.




Sometimes in life you move too fast 💨 but yet it seems to be in slow motion. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was losing my mom. She was terminally ill. So I was grasping at straws...reaching for a lifeline.  So I grabbed the closest hand 🤚🏾 and jumped. Hoping to climb out of the abyss but knowing I was leaping off a cliff without a parachute...yet I hoped for a soft landing.

It wasn't soft. It was hard... I violently fell into a dismal existence. Not wanting to be where I was but too scared to run 🏃.  I was a coward. So I threw myself into my work. I accepted a promotion and then I worked. I worked because I was a public success and a private failure.  I'm great at my job. I can make the tough decisions and have the difficult conversations. I never miss a deadline. I do the hard stuff that no one else wants to...at least at work.

I am a private failure. I don't have good personal relationships. I can't say "this isn't working for me" so I ghost. Ghosting is a cowards way out. It also doesn't work.   So I ghosted on him for 3 years.

Neither one of us wanted to go first. It was just a piece of paper 📝. Then I realized I was stuck. Stuck in 2011. Because I couldn't admit I made a mistake. We aren't good for each other. He was there when I was losing her...when I lost her, I lost a piece of me and he was a surrogate for what I lost.

I finally had the conversation, I finally got unstuck. And then I asked him to sign the piece of paper 📝. That piece of paper was really like a weight holding me back, keeping me stuck. Keeping me from living.  Because as long as I had legal ties I was content to not create emotional ones. I was content to not live, to not feel.  We signed the paper and went from we to me. Truthfully, there was never a we, there was me hiding from the pain of being a daughter who missed her mother. So now I am free to be the real me and to get busy living instead of just existing because of a piece of paper 📝.


Thanks for reading.
MzNewy
😘