You left him and you still miss him

[Saturday, writing Monday’s issue, dated September 28.]

It’s 9:47 on a Tuesday night. You’re on the porch, phone in your hand, thumb hovering over his name in your Favorites, and you are the one who left him three months ago in a Whole Foods parking lot with the trunk open.

You gave him the reasons. You had a list. Six months of therapy in one afternoon, delivered clean. He nodded. He did not fight you. That was somehow worse.

Here is what almost nobody warns you about the season of leaving. You still miss him. And because you left, you are not allowed to.

•••

That is the rule you gave yourself. It is a stupid rule. Put it down.

I read for a woman last month, call her June, who ended a six-year thing in July. Packed a Camry. Drove from Charlotte to her sister’s place in Wilmington. Cried at every gas station between them. Sat down across from me in October with the exact question you are holding right now: “Am I supposed to feel this awful if I did the right thing?”

Yes. That is precisely what the right thing feels like when the right thing is also the sad thing. You are not being punished. You are grieving. Two different departments.

Guess what the twin flame internet will tell June this week. That her guilt is a “sign the connection is asking her back.” That the missing him at 9:47 is his “energy pulling on the cord.” That the whole feeling is her unhealed inner child, and $297 will clear it in a Sacred Feminine Return Bundle by Sunday.

Small correction. June’s body is doing what a body does when it disconnects from a person it was attached to for six years. That is not a portal. That is a nervous system.

“But what if I was wrong?” Maybe. Genuinely, maybe. That is a question you can answer, and it has an instrument, and the instrument is Behavior Over Time. Not his. Yours.

In the ninety days since you left, are you sleeping? Are the friends you dropped when you were in it coming back into frame? Is the small crooked thing inside you that wanted to leave for two years getting quieter, or louder?

The women who regret leaving usually know inside sixty days. It does not sound like grief. It sounds like a growing certainty that the reasons on the list were smaller than the person, and a body that keeps trying to walk back to the car. That is different from what you are doing on the porch tonight.

Am I telling you I know which one you are? I have never met you. But the clean leavers who grieved hard almost never came back saying I was wrong. They came back saying I was tired.

01	What am I trying to feel less of by picking up the phone?
02	If I knew for certain that leaving was right, would I still be missing him tonight?
03	Which of my reasons for leaving is still true this week?