Your Name

I watched the cursor dance in the little white box and sighed. Why did I have to make my password your name and a mix of numbers that now gagged me with emotions? It should be an easy process to reset your password, but I made it unknowingly difficult to process the change when the day finally came. It had been logged in for years, saved in my keychain. The prompt came up and I was hit with a wave of emotions...it's time to change your password. I didn't realize when I first read the words change that it meant more than just a word, it meant changing my perspective too.

I remembered you sitting near me the day I made my account, thinking you'd be a part of my life forever...someone I wouldn't want to ever forget. I could feel the sun on my shoulders as if we were back hiking the hills together, stopping at every creek to skip rocks and talk about our lives. I could count the freckles I gained that day, every one like your words on my skin forever. The lackadaisical wandering we'd do through the woods, through sand and sea. There was no destination, just the hope that we would eventually find our way home. It didn't matter where we went, as long as we went together. I remembered wiping your tears with every heartbreak, and helping you gather them to grow a garden of possibility. I guess I wasn't pictured in your final design for your garden, and you weeded me out. We had written so many short stories as a duo, and haphazardly glued them together into a book of our expectations. Expectations aren't reality though, and I guess the grass was just greener where you ended up.

I could feel the cursor judging me after a while. To be fair, I'd probably judge myself too. To give so much of my time, heart and spirit to someone who no longer wished to give me the same back. I'd taken the road to them too many times myself, only to have them refuse over and over again to meet me even halfway. I began to realize, that the good memories I had clung so tightly too were shining a blinding light over all of my memories of you. I hadn't been able to see the parts of you that stood in the shadows, waving your red flags. I went through my memories of you, and began to realize that there were only a few food memories, and the rest were me filling in the gaps and making excuses for you. I watched the pedestal I'd placed you on begin to shrink. You're just a human, like me, not a superhero. You weren't the compass in those adventures long ago, I was. I found my own way home, and you found your way to where you needed to go. I had to stop and realize that in the end, I had to be my own North Star.

I finally began to type in letters, forming the first word in my new password. It wasn't a person this time, but a place. A place I loved to go to, that I'd shared with you a couple times even. It was a place that no matter how much sorrow I witnessed, it had never lost it's shine. I followed it with a string of numbers, todays date. A day I moved on, the very day I let your name stop having so much power over me. I reset my password, and closed a chapter of my life.