Cropping out history

I sat at home flipping through a magazine when I received a text form a friend. I look at my phone to find it’s a picture of her and Superman announcing that they were now in a relationship.

I laughed out loud. She’s so silly.

“If it were only that easy” I replied

“It should be”

“Right”

“Well maybe you can’t crop your way into someone’s heart. But can you crop someone out of your own?” And I knew where she was headed.

Recently she’d suffered an ill fated love affair. The type that leaves you reeling because you gave so much more than you could afford to give.

They’d had a whirlwind romance. The type that usually ends with a white dress and a reception where you vow eternal love for one another. But short from taking that step of asking her to marry him, he developed many doubts. Instead of working through those doubts, he decided he simply didn’t want to be in a relationship with her. She was left in shock. From night to day, he changed his mind, and she, well she had no choice but to respect his decision.

“My heart won’t listen to my mind. I just want to be over him. Why aren’t I over him?”

She was fighting a battle; the realization of loss, the abandonment, the dissolution, and the piling of mixed emotions were asphyxiating her rationality.

What she really wanted was an easy fix to her ever breaking heart. But when it comes to healing, it’s a process. One that requires that pesky little word – Time. Because if it were that easy to just hit crop, narrow the corners of our lives, exclude the unwanted, unnecessary parts of our lives. Would our pictures ever be whole? Without all the pieces, would the puzzle ever really be complete?

They say that if you don’t pay attention to the past you will never understand the future. And maybe it’s true. Maybe in the grand scheme of things it makes us stronger, wiser, and more resilient.

He was a memory that she never wanted to visit again. And I couldn’t blame her. But it wasn’t about him any longer; it was about looking closer at the picture. Zooming in. Realizing that the girl with the red watery eyes, who wore sadness on her shoulders, would come out the other end a better, much stronger person.

See hitting crop too many times doesn’t free us of the unnecessary; it cripples us to a much smaller grasp of things. Because you can crop the person out of the picture, but you can’t crop the memories lived with them. Our lives aren’t self edited still images we post to have someone comment and critique on. Our lives are a running moving, picture, with sound and bloopers.

Bad things are always going to happen in life. You are bound to get hurt. But instead of cowering away from that, that will only mold you, it is necessary to just accept things. Deal with the emotions, and face the issues head on. Realizing that it’s your story and in the end it’s entirely up to you how the ending is written. And if all else fails, well, you can always Photoshop a picture of Superman right next to you. :)