What If Closure Never Comes?

For a long time, I kept trying to make my marriage work in my head.

I replayed conversations. Thought about what he should have said, what he should have understood, what he should apologise for. I imagined how things could have been if only he had done things differently.

And I kept seeking closure. That one conversation. That apology. That moment when he would finally understand what I had been trying to tell him.

Somewhere, I believed that if he understood, if he acknowledged my hurt, I could finally put it down.

But healing slowly made me see how much of my life I was spending trying to change something that had already happened.

The day I finally left his home, I touched the walls before leaving.

I prayed to Laddu Radha.

“Laddu Radha, you have been in this house. Please keep bringing happiness here as well.”

I wanted happiness for him, too.

And when I look back at that moment, I feel proud of the person I was becoming.

Because I wasn’t wishing away my pain. I wasn’t saying that what happened didn’t matter.

I just didn’t need his life to turn out badly for mine to turn out well.

I didn’t need him to suffer for my suffering to count.

And I didn’t need him to become someone else for me to finally move forward.

Perhaps this is what healing asks of us.

Not to forget what happened, but to stop making the past happen again and again inside us.

We cannot undo the hurt, the insult, the betrayal, the abandonment.

But we can keep returning to it, looking for the apology, the explanation, the ending that will finally make it bearable.

And in doing so, we keep handing yesterday another day of our lives.

Sometimes our attachment to pain is not really an attachment to the hurt itself.

It is our attachment to the way we wish things had happened.

We are still waiting for the past to give us something different.

And perhaps healing begins when we want our present back more than we want that impossible ending.

I know how hard that can be. Because understanding that we cannot change the past doesn’t automatically make us stop reaching for it.

Sometimes we need help understanding why we keep going back, why the same memories still hold us, why a part of us is still waiting for something that may never come.

This is the work I hold space for.

Not to tell anyone to forget, forgive or move on.

But to make room for what has remained unfinished inside, so that slowly, life can become about more than what happened to us.

There is a life waiting for us beyond the need for a different ending.

I had to find my way there, too.