“Don’t look back.”
In the novel, One Bright Moon, after the main character successfully got out of China, his only means of communicating with his mother and the rest of his family was through writing. Knowing how much he longed for the family he had left behind, his mother would write “Don’t look back” in her letters to him, as a way of cutting strings and urging him to pursue the bright future that awaited him.
Coming from an immigrant family that has given up so much to be where we are now, “Don’t look back” weighs so much more to us than the three syllables it carries.
It’s paradoxical, isn’t it? To carry our past with us, yet not look back? I know. I understand this piece of my heritage in the fibre of my being, but I struggle to articulate it to others or even to my younger self when I was grappling with understanding my hybrid identity.
And I guess the context I am trying to portray in this entry is that despite being terrible at goodbyes and at relinquishing the profound emotional ties attached to each person I’ve had to let go, I have mastered the art of Don’t look back.
The first time I voluntarily let someone go was in 2012. My ex and I had traveled the world and moved to a different continent together. We were young, fervently in love, and brimming with dreams, aspirations, and infinite optimism for the future ahead of us. While he wanted to take his company global and travel the world, I wanted to build assets and ultimately start a family.
When you love and respect someone immensely, but are unable to align your futures, you have to let them go so they can soar and find their blue sky. So we did. After many conversations, copious amounts of tears, and too many yet not enough goodbyes, we parted ways.
We remained close friends, seeking each other’s counsel and finding comfort in our familiarity and shared past. After all, we had spent pivotal years of our lives together. We witnessed each other’s struggles as our careers took off in a foreign country, consoled each other during anxious, sleepless nights. We learned each other’s strengths and came to revere each other’s vision and the pursuit of it. He holds an irreplaceable place in my heart, and I in his.
Over the years, we sometimes talked about what would have happened if we had stayed together, particularly when our parents spoke fondly of the other person and inquired about how they were doing. But those conversations were more like thought experiments than reality. The moment our paths diverged, we were destined to end up in different worlds, and that was a good thing. It was part of growing up. We understood that: One can’t be looking forward and looking back at the same time.
The past is a place of reference, not a place of residence.
Roy T. Bennett
Since him, I have fallen in love, but never to the same extent or intensity that I loved him.
“That was it, the love of my life,” I acquiesced. That is, until I fell madly, wildly, unabashedly in love again.
This time, it was with someone like the alchemist in The Alchemist. He belonged to the desert, the wind, the stars, the sun, and every element of the nature, while almost none of the manmade conventions. We made an earnest effort to reconcile our lifestyle differences without betraying who we were.
Eventually, with much anguish and pain, we had to let each other go.
A year after our breakup, on our anniversary, he wrote me a long letter after months of mutually agreed-upon silence:
I still love you. Of course I do. I fell for you so quickly. I don’t fall so easily anymore, and haven’t in almost a decade. But it was so sudden and certain with you, and that part hasn’t changed. It wasn’t a mistake; I was right all along — you will be the closest to marriage I’ve ever been. You’re still the same woman you were when we first met, so my feelings haven’t changed.
But I can’t tell you these things anymore.
It felt like a cruel joke: to be so in love yet we couldn’t be.
“Don’t look back,” was all we could whisper to ourselves on those heartbroken nights as we inched forward in our lives separately.
Letting go means to come to the realization that some people are a part of your history, but not a part of your destiny.
Steve Maraboli
Now, almost six years later, I am glad that we decided to let each other go. I trust that I am exactly where I am supposed to be, and as long as I continue to honour my heart, I will eventually find my personal treasure.
So here I am, soldiering on. Although I don’t know how many goodbyes are yet awaiting me, I do know that I am not looking back. Not now, not ever.
Ms. C. Loves 