The War Between Remembering and Forgetting

Whenever I end a relationship with someone I really care about, I allow myself a decent amount of bounce back time.  Depending on the length and depth of the relationship, I try to make it a point to shake most of the residual feelings after a month or two.  Because I hate the idea that once that person is gone from my life, they are still getting a piece of me. 

With that being said, it's been over a month since my last contact with HSF.  We left each other in a very civil manner.  There weren't any hurtful exchanges.  It was a very mature correspondence in which we both came to terms with the fact that we are just looking for different things in life right now.  And that it wouldn't be fair to either one of us to continue in a relationship we weren't seeing eye to eye on.  I was actually impressed, despite how immature some of our arguments in the past had a tendency of becoming.  I read his final words of goodbye a few hundred times, and then prepared myself for a few weeks of tears, red wine, and meaningless sex with strangers.

A month later, I am happy to announce I only had meaningless sex with one stranger.  And even more impressively, I have refrained from any contact with HSF.  To the extreme in which I haven't the ONCE peaked at his facebook, twitter, tumblr, G+, etc.  When Charlie and I broke up, I almost broke my computer mouse from the shear frequency of hitting the refresh button.  I wanted to know who he was talking to, where he was going, when he was going there.  This time around I have literally put myself on a HSF blackout and have seen NOTHING concerning him since the last email he sent.  So you would think that getting over him would be faster than the previous man-friends I dangled on to feelings to for longer than I should have.

Here's the problem.  The only connection I still have to HSF is how much I miss him.  This feeling in the pit of my stomach that makes me want to call him, or click through his tumblr, or send him a g-chat message.  It's not constant, it ebbs and flows.  It hits me the hardest when I see something funny on tv, or I read an interesting article about this upcoming election.  I think about how his music is coming along, and how his classes are going.  And I want to reach out so bad sometimes, but I know as a result of our last conversation that there isn't a point.  He isn't going to stop looking for what it is he wants, and I am not willing to settle for less than what I want.  So there is no point in missing him anymore, I understand that there just can not be a future there.

I do also understand though that once I stop missing him, once I turn off that part of my brain and heart that longs for all night conversations and late night sexting, that this is infinitely done. That the things I was looking forward to sharing with him this summer are no longer  feelings I can hold on to. No 100 hour long television marathons, no Aziz Ansari in the city. Those things aren't future memories. They finally die like our relationship did a month ago.

So I'm mentally preparing for an emotional purge, one that will hopefully be healthier than those past. And that at some point, sooner than later, I will stop letting him have that piece of me by finally forgetting to miss him.