Upon reading
Pt. I, I realise that Lauren isn't "my" Lauren anymore. I don't think of her that way and it wasn't until I stumbled upon the many uses of "my" that I realised this. All feelings of personal possession have vanished; she isn't mine to hold in my heart anymore. I think the freedom I'm feeling at the moment is due in part because of this relinquishment and in turn, the relinquishment has occurred because of the lack of unconscious possession towards her within myself. I didn't even know I had been saving real estate for her in my heart until I wasn't anymore. As I made my way through the words of the post, my use of such a possessive pronoun struck me as awkward, and I was tempted to edit it out. I wondered if I should, but I opted to maintain the entry as it is because after all, it is entry - a piece of my past, an artifact in the present and something to take care of for the future; editing it would just be rude. I wanted to change "my" to " ". And yes, that is a bunch of Nothing between those quotations marks because try as I might, I just couldn't recreate a single sense of whatever it was that had inspired me to use the pronoun "my" in the first place. Instead, all I feel is this wonderful emptiness - free emptiness - in place of whatever the need for that "my" was that had taken up space for so long. Gone is any sense of possession, one once reciprocated for an era, and then rescinded for another. The newly excavated space in my heart practically tingles with potential energy at the thought of what I might hold there now.
I must say, Time is a wonderful thing; it does such a lovely job of clearing out those dusty, broken bits of yourself that were swept to the far corners of your headspace. Such a good job, in fact, that you don't even know it has happened until a spark of remembrance brings its location to your attention again. And wouldn't you know it? There's suddenly nothing there to be attentive to.
So you breathe.
