The Day I Finally Let Go of Who I Used to Be

I found my kindred spirit lurking in the attic.

Not a being in the strictest sense. Told you it was more like a ghost bathed in the scent of old perfume: frayed notebooks, broken verses of songs I no longer listened to, fading memories. She must have been there, waiting.

The box was written for miscellaneous.

Which, looking back, was kind of appropriate. For that is what she had become.

A medley of things that were no longer allowed anywhere.

Inside lay photographs with edges curled like question marks, a pair of shoes too small for my feet now, and letters I wrote to someone who never read them—maybe because they never really saw me at all.

I sat there cross-legged on the floor-like a child-sifting through the rubble of who I used to be.

In those pictures, she smiled so much. But it was a survival smile—the kind that begs: Please like me. Please choose me. Please do not leave.

Hugged in a smile like wallpaper over cracked walls.

The light flickered in the attic. Dust danced in mockery, celebrating my indecisiveness.

I held one picture closer: Me at 22, in a dress handpicked by someone else, beside a man who loved the idea of me more than he loved my truth.

I measured my worth in those days by how much I could keep quiet. How agreeable. How small.

They called me kind.

What they meant was—convenient.

They called me strong.

What they meant was—she won’t leave, even when it hurts.

But something had changed.

When it changed, I don’t know. Maybe that night I cried when I didn’t know why. Or maybe that day I laughed and felt no guilt about it. Or perhaps it was that moment of silence after he slammed the door and I thought about… I wasn’t scared anymore. I was simply tired.

Tired of watering putrid gardens.

Tired of having to justify why I grew roots in places they couldn’t understand.

Tired of my loyalty to pain because I was used to it.

So I stood up.

With care, like someone learning to walk.

I carried the box downstairs and placed it gently outside.

Not to burn it.

Not to bury it.

Just to let it go.

She—my old self—deserved that.

A soft goodbye.

Not a violent death.

Because she did what she could.

She navigated me through rooms I never should've entered, through conversations that chipped away at my soul, through relationships where I had to exchange pieces of me to just feel loved.

But now—

I need no more to be palatable.

I fit nowhere that is too small for my fire.

That evening, I sat barefoot on my balcony, drinking tea that tasted like closure. The sky was bleeding oranges and pinks-just like even the Sun had to fall apart to become beautiful.

I said almost to no one,

"Thank you for surviving. But we don't live there anymore."

The day when I finally let go of who I was, that was the night I encountered the woman I had always meant to become.