The Awfulness of Endings, Surprises and New Beginnings

I live my life quietly, most of the time.

Until the silence begins to eat away at my sanity, stains my cheeks with unexplained tears and weighs my breaths with heaviness and anxiety.

And so here I am.

I’ve been busy these past few weeks, finishing up the last classes of my undergraduate career, enjoying my mom’s graduation and then my own and getting my feet wet with a full-time internship at a full service PR and advertising agency.

There hasn’t been time for silence or stillness.

***

This is my first free weekend in a long while, the second night that I’ve found myself laying silently in my bed, thinking.

I think it’s safe to say that I’ve now made it through another ending.

There is a bit of sadness, as there always is; disappointment, as there always is; and surprise, another constant element in the midst of change.  

These are things that I’ve ignored, refused to acknowledge, through the slow-down that preceded the end and the quick pick up that was the new beginning.

Endings are terrible. I dread them with reason; the goodbyes that only one of us knows is the last, the unmet expectations, the longing that I’ve learned will never subside.

***

And I’d like to skim over the details: the tears that I refused to cry, the people that broke my heart by not being there, the words left unsaid.

But silence makes such skimming hard, if not impossible, to do.

It’s been a much smoother transition than I expected; my first steps into the big wide world. 

Even still, I’ve found myself hurting and longing, disappointedly.

I had a bit of an outburst while on the phone with a friend the other day, after which I was able to process all of the emotion that is now making its way to the surface.

***

It comes down to letting go. Something I’ve got to do. The sooner the better.

To wave goodbye, as I nearly shouted on the phone, to those that have decided that they don’t want to be here with me as I expected them to be. As they said they’d be.

To stop loving the boy that I keep letting break my heart with his indecision.

To stop hoping, waiting, foolishly for the things that I know will never come.

***

There were—are—however, some beautiful surprises in the midst of all the shuffling.

• There are some people that I’m not saying goodbye to as soon as I’d expected. And others that have found their way back in my life- even if only for a catching up of sorts

• I got a kick-ass internship, something that I worried anxiously about all semester. And I’m enjoying it much more than I thought I would. 

• I  participated in the commencement ceremony with the people I’ve spent the last two years with and grown to love. It’s a memory we can all share, sitting out on the quad chatting (during the commencement speech) and laughing that last time before we scattered off to find—and make— our own places in the world.

These are the things that I’ll hold on to, open-handedly, of course, as I let go of the gut wrenching awfulness that I expect at each end.

It is the surprises that will usher in the new beginning.