Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness, and errors, and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds. It dies of weariness, of withering, of tarnishing.

I leaned against the plane window and stared in to the distance. For the first time since I heard the news, I was alone. I could finally hear what my mind was screaming. I could finally feel how my heart was beating. Even 30,000 thousand feet above the ground it was true… Omission was betrayal.

Weeks ago I’d learned that my ex-boyfriend and one of my supposed to be “best friends” had something going on right after we broke up years ago. I didn’t know all the details and I’ve never been one to be derailed by just hearsay, so I simply didn’t react. I decided to wait. To gather all the facts before I could form an opinion.

As the weeks passed I learned more and more details, I heard more stories, till finally I couldn’t take it any longer and I confronted my ex. He confirmed all my worst fears. They had indeed dated, for months to be exact. And the only reason that it ended according to him was because he found out that she was talking to someone else at the same time.

It was one thing to wrap your head around hearsay. But when you have facts, the real harsh truth, and from several sources, suffice to say, it makes the ground beneath you shake. So I read the texts over and over again till it seemed like I had memorized the words. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I thought the world would atomically combust in that moment, only to find it didn’t. I just felt the blood rushing out of my body, my chest tightening up, and my breath coming out slowly. I’d wanted to learn the truth, and now? Now, I didn’t know what to do with it.

They say the truth hurts. That hearing it is a release of honesty but also a sharp incision in the heart. The truth can free you of the anxiety but it can also bind you to feeling the consequences of its reality. Anchoring you. The thing in telling the truth is that though it’s an honest act, a moral act, that doesn’t mean that what you have to say it what others would like to hear.

Reality is startling that way; it can shift the ground beneath you. Shake your faith right where you stand and make you question everything you ever thought you knew. When deception comes out, in its path it weakens our foundation, it erases the memories you held, and it breaks all faith deposited.

It almost felt like a death. Except I wasn’t losing one person. I was losing two. It was like that part of my life was just gone. It was almost too easy, for something I once thought had meant everything. But you can’t hide from the truth, no matter how much you want to. Because when the cards unravel, and the truth comes out, it makes everything else you lived with that person seem like a complete lie.

“Talk to me” My real best friend had rushed to see me as soon as she heard I had confirmed, she knew it was important for me to thought process what I had just learned.

“When he and I broke up, I broke as a person, as a human being. I thought there must have been something wrong with me. I unraveled so much I lost myself for years in the most detrimental of ways. And to think that my “best friend”, someone I treated like a sister, knowingly, was even just a tiny bit part of that anguish, is by far more than I can bear”

“I know. You are also by far a much better person than I am. By now, I would have of at least told someone off.”

“It’s not that I’m not angry. It’s not that I’m not capable of yelling. It’s just that neither of the two deserve the effort. When you think you have something to lose, you fight for it. If there was a friendship worth saving maybe I’d make a bigger issue of it. But there is no real friendship where someone has lied and used you, where someone has willingly participated in bringing you harm and making a fool of you. There is no safe way of remaining in a relationship with someone who has no conscience.”

The truth is that the more I think about it, the more I don’t understand. It’d be very easy to fall apart and build a fortress around my heart. Instead, I remember the words of a dear friend many years ago: “How long you dwell in defeat is entirely up to how fast you get tired of feeling like a failure. You just have to stop thinking about what you think you lost and look forward to what there is to gain…”

I refuse to become a statistic. A jaded heart and an untrusting person. Because the more anger towards the past you carry, the less capable you are of loving in the present. I’m not currently in love. I’m not even dating anyone. But I know this much, if I ever want to move on from this truth, I can’t give it more power than it deserves. I’d rather just move on with my life. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, or that I’m not going to allow myself to thought process and heal. But just that if resentment is a deteriorating disease I will not partake in nurturing it.

Life itself will always find a way to throw you curve balls and throw you off balance. There will always be something unsettling drawing in the horizon. It’s just a part of life. It’s what we chose to do when it all tumbles down that truly defines us. The lessons we learn, and the strength we recover. In the end, we need it all, the good with the bad, to write our own story.