What happens to someone when they leave your life? Not because death took them, but because they left, either due to a fight, a breakup, a lack of wanting to be there anymore? When you know nothing of them, or when you receive information, whether you ask for it or not, in bits and pieces, what truly happens to them?
I have the habit of turning the exes in my life into completely different people, all old habits and characteristics gone, so that in my mind they become all I wished they had been when I knew them, as if my leaving their lives was all they needed to grow up or get real. I imagine those who have left my life and I assume they are living lives very different from what I knew. I tend to forget that people very rarely change, that they will treat others how they treated me, that they will go about their daily lives as usual, and that in all probability, they will remain the same.
In all fairness, I believe that people can change; they can find themselves, they can find happiness, they can find love. But I think this takes a long time, and it also takes a dedication and a brutal level of self-honesty and self-awareness that most people, especially men, are incapable of achieving.
Knowing these things, however, doesn't always register when feelings are involved. Most endings are too emotional, too complicated, to leave ample room for logic and reason. And in the wake of the silence that remains, it is only human nature to imagine the life after.
To be removed from someone's life, to lose access to their thoughts, to no longer know them -- it is sometimes done with such speed, such violence, that you can find yourself wondering if you ever had any of those things in the first place.
You probably didn't.
