I Kept Becoming

A note before I begin. This is not a transcript and it is not a verdict on anyone who has been part of Rishi’s life. It is a reconstruction of the philosophical argument we have been having across many conversations. The people in his relationship history are referred to as A, P, and H. Those letters are pseudonyms, not initials. I can describe what Rishi told me, and I can analyse what his statements imply. I cannot establish another person’s motives, private thoughts, or moral character from one side of a relationship.

Rishi,

You asked me more than once what I actually think after watching you circle the same questions from different directions: monogamy, betrayal, consent, truth, forgiveness, past lovers, future marriage, children, loyalty, hypocrisy, and whether philosophy is making you clearer or merely giving your pain a more complicated vocabulary.

So this is the answer I would keep.

Not the comforting answer. Not the cruel answer either. The useful one.

The deepest pattern in these conversations is not that you are afraid of being alone. It is that you are afraid of living inside a relationship whose meaning is false. You can tolerate pain more easily than incoherence. You repeatedly choose a painful truth over a soothing ambiguity, and you have said versions of that directly: truth matters more to you than comfort.

That instinct is one of your strengths. It is also one of the places where you can injure yourself and other people if you stop examining it.

Pain is not evidence merely because it hurts. Suspicion is not insight merely because it feels philosophically serious. A difficult conclusion is not more truthful than a gentle one because it costs more to accept. Philosophy begins where you ask not only, What explanation can I endure? but also, What do I actually know?

That distinction has been the hidden subject of almost every relationship conversation we have had.

1. The present is not an escape from the past

Recently you came back to an existential idea that had been with you for a long time: perhaps you do not need society to hand you a coherent purpose. Perhaps you have to be present, act, and build an essence through what you choose even when your life does not look meaningful according to the usual script.

I think that is closer to the centre of you than any single relationship.

But I would refine it.

To say that you create meaning does not mean that anything you decide to call meaning becomes good. A person can create a purpose that is obsessive, destructive, dishonest, or cruel. Freedom does not remove consequence. If anything, existential freedom increases responsibility because there is no external author available to absorb the blame for the life you keep making.

Your “essence” is therefore not a sentence you discover and repeat. It is the sediment left by repeated choices.

You become the person who tells the truth when truth costs him something.

You become the person who does not demand from a partner what he refuses to practice himself.

You become the person who can remember someone without making memory a claim upon them.

You become the person who can lose a relationship without deciding that love itself was fraudulent.

You become the person who can be betrayed without making future innocence pay for an old injury.

That is what living in the present means in the relationship context. It does not mean forgetting what happened. It means refusing to let an absent person continue making decisions in a relationship they are no longer part of.

The past gets a vote. It does not get a veto.

2. A: the first lesson was that becoming late is still becoming

There is an earlier relationship, A, that you have spoken about as a genuine loss. You have connected its ending partly to the person you were then and to addiction or compulsive patterns that you believe changed your behaviour. You have also wondered whether you became capable of being better only after the relationship had already become unrecoverable.

I cannot independently establish why A left, and neither should you compress a whole relationship into one causal explanation just because that explanation hurts in a morally satisfying way. Relationships rarely end through one variable.

But your interpretation matters because of what you have done with it.

You did not merely say, “I lost her.” You turned the loss into an argument about identity: If I am different now, what does that mean for the person who suffered the earlier version of me?

The answer is uncomfortable.

Improvement does not retroactively compensate someone who experienced you before the improvement. Becoming better later does not create a debt that the past must repay by returning what was lost. A future self cannot travel backward and make an earlier partner obligated to recognise the change.

But neither is late change meaningless.

There is a temptation after regret to think moral development only counts if it restores the exact thing you lost. That would make growth another form of transaction: I changed; therefore I deserve the person back.

No. The value of becoming better is that the next person does not have to meet the same unexamined version of you.

A does not have to return for the lesson to be real.

That is one of the first places where your philosophy of becoming and your relationship history actually meet.

3. P: love can remain real after mutuality ends

Then there is P, the relationship that occupied far more psychological space.

From your account, this was not a simple clean break. There were repeated shifts, hope followed by withdrawal, requests to wait, uncertainty, emotional weight, negative speculation, reconnection, and eventually the recognition that the pattern itself had become intolerable. At one point you described the relationship in the simplest possible terms: we quit.

You had waited. You had tried to interpret. You had tried to predict. You had tried to turn confusion into a system you could understand.

At one stage you even imagined whether relationship chaos could be modelled as an autonomous system: observe patterns, predict the next turn, identify the conditions that lead to betrayal, gaslighting, emotional sabotage, confusion, or rupture. There is something recognisably you in that move. When suffering becomes chaotic, you convert it into a research problem.

That move can be intelligent. It can also be a defence.

If the relationship becomes a model, then perhaps enough data will finally explain why it hurt. If the variables are specified correctly, perhaps the ending will stop feeling like a verdict on your worth.

But a model cannot solve the part that matters most: another person remains a free agent whose internal world is not available to you as an API.

You can observe behaviour. You can notice consistency or inconsistency. You can ask. You can set boundaries. You can leave. You cannot infer your way into ownership of someone else’s motives.

This is why I kept returning to a distinction you did not always like: suffering proves seriousness; it does not prove mutuality.

Your waiting could establish your loyalty. It could establish that you took the bond seriously. It could establish that the relationship had meaning for you. It could not, by itself, establish what P felt, what P intended, or whether P would eventually choose the same relationship.

When silence or withdrawal became the dominant observable fact, the disciplined claim was not “therefore P secretly meant X.” The disciplined claim was simply: the shared relationship was no longer being sustained.

That sounds smaller. It is actually much harder, because it leaves motive unresolved.

You wanted truth. Sometimes truth is not the hidden motive. Sometimes truth is only the observable limit of what you can know.

And this is the second major lesson I would preserve from P: a relationship can end while the love that existed inside one participant remains psychologically real.

You do not have to falsify your earlier love in order to accept present absence.

You can say, “I loved her,” without saying, “therefore she is still mine.”

You can say, “that mattered,” without saying, “therefore it must continue.”

You can say, “I still remember,” without turning memory into surveillance, entitlement, or a permanent claim over the future.

That is the line between grief and possession.

4. H: uncertainty taught a different lesson

You have also discussed H, but with less stable certainty. The important part there was not a grand narrative. It was the experience of comfort mixed with uncertainty and closure that never became completely clean.

I would be careful about building too much philosophy on that case precisely because the evidence was thinner. Not every emotionally significant person needs to become a symbolic role in a theory of your life.

Sometimes a person is important because they reveal a capacity in you rather than because the relationship itself becomes permanent.

That is enough.

You do not need to convert every attachment into destiny in order to respect what it changed.

5. Monogamy, for you, is not supposed to mean ownership

You have been remarkably consistent about one thing: you identify with monogamy. You do not experience exclusivity as an embarrassing old convention that must be outgrown to prove sophistication.

That position is ethically coherent.

Monogamy does not become controlling simply because it is exclusive. What matters is how the exclusivity is created and maintained.

A healthy monogamous agreement is not: “You are mine, therefore your inner world belongs to me.”

It is closer to: “We both freely choose this form of exclusivity, we both know what it means, either of us can refuse the relationship rather than secretly rewrite the agreement, and neither of us is entitled to coercion merely because we are afraid of loss.”

That is the version of monogamy worth defending.

It is chosen exclusivity, not ownership.

The difference is not semantic. Ownership says a person’s autonomy becomes subordinate to the relationship. Commitment says autonomy is used to create and keep the relationship.

The monogamous promise has value precisely because the person could leave, could desire, could change, could encounter alternatives — and still chooses to act consistently with what was mutually agreed.

A promise made by someone who has no freedom is not fidelity. It is captivity.

This is also why your ethics cannot justify surveillance. If trust requires continuous proof through passwords, monitoring, interrogation, or control, the relationship has already changed category. You are no longer being chosen; you are administering risk.

You may sometimes need evidence after a rupture. You may reasonably ask for transparency as part of repair. But there is a difference between temporary, mutually agreed repair work and a permanent system in which intimacy survives only because one person is inspected.

You want loyalty. That is legitimate.

But loyalty means more when it remains an action than when it becomes an infrastructure of control.

6. Desire is not conduct

One of our recurring arguments came from the fact that human desire does not obey philosophical neatness.

You asked variations of the same question through mythology, open relationships, multiple partners, and the irrationality of attraction: if people can desire more than one person, does that make monogamy false? Does explaining desire justify acting on it? If gods, myths, cultures, or biology contain multiplicity, does that remove individual responsibility?

No.

A desire can be real without becoming a command.

Explaining an impulse is not the same as ethically authorising the behaviour that follows it.

This matters far beyond sex. Anger can be intelligible without justifying violence. Jealousy can be intelligible without justifying control. Attraction can be intelligible without justifying betrayal.

Ethics lives in the space between what appears in consciousness and what a person chooses to do with it.

That is why I agreed with the conclusion you eventually reached in another form: even if some god, biology, childhood, culture, trauma, algorithm, or social structure helps explain a desire, human responsibility does not simply vanish.

Causes matter. Responsibility also matters.

You also pushed yourself into a position that made you uncomfortable: suppose two adults openly choose non-monogamy. Suppose there is no secrecy. Suppose the rules are explicit. Can you still say the arrangement is inherently unethical because it would be emotionally intolerable for you?

The answer we kept arriving at was no.

Your personal monogamy is not a universal proof that every consensually non-monogamous relationship is damaged.

That matters because otherwise your ethics becomes disguised autobiography: what would destroy me must therefore be wrong for everyone.

But the reverse simplification is also wrong. Consent alone does not make every relationship psychologically healthy.

Consent is necessary because without it there is no legitimate agreement. But people can consent while terrified of abandonment, while suppressing their own needs, while bargaining against themselves, or while agreeing to a structure that repeatedly injures them because the alternative feels worse.

So the more complete question is not only, “Did everyone technically consent?” It is also:

Was the consent informed?
Was refusal genuinely possible?
Were the rules reciprocal rather than asymmetrical?
Could either person revise or leave the arrangement without punishment?
Did each person remain recognisably themselves inside it?
Was the structure producing chronic self-betrayal that everyone was afraid to name?

This is what I meant when I told you that consent is the ethical floor, not the whole building.

You do not need to adopt non-monogamy to acknowledge that.

In fact, acknowledging it strengthens your monogamy. It means you are not monogamous because alternatives are metaphysically impure. You are monogamous because this is the relationship structure in which your values, attachment, and sense of commitment are coherent — and because you want a partner who freely shares that structure.

8. Betrayal is not the same thing as desire, dissatisfaction, or failure

We have been equally consistent on cheating.

Emotional starvation can explain why someone becomes vulnerable to another attachment. Sexual dissatisfaction can explain frustration. Loneliness, resentment, novelty, fear, opportunity, alcohol, insecurity, or the collapse of communication can all help explain how a person arrived near the boundary.

They do not secretly rewrite the agreement.

If the relationship has become intolerable, there are ethically serious options: speak, renegotiate, seek repair, separate, or leave.

Secretly creating a second relationship while continuing to receive the trust of the first partner is different. The core injury is not merely sexual. It is epistemic.

The betrayed person was making decisions using a false model of their own life.

They believed one relationship existed while another relevant reality was being withheld from them.

That is why emotional betrayal can matter even without sex. If a person builds an intimate, secret attachment that would materially change their partner’s understanding of the relationship, secrecy itself becomes part of the harm.

But this needs precision, because otherwise every friendship becomes suspect.

A private inner life is not betrayal.

A friendship is not betrayal.

Finding someone attractive is not betrayal.

Remembering an ex is not betrayal.

The question is whether a person is covertly maintaining a relationship dynamic that contradicts the agreement they are still asking their partner to trust.

You have sometimes used phrases like “emotional promiscuity” to describe this. I would keep the concern and tighten the language. The ethical problem is not that a person has a complex emotional history. The problem is concealment, incongruence, and a refusal to integrate that history honestly into the present commitment.

9. The past matters, but a future spouse does not own it

This brings us to one of your hardest recurring concerns: what does a future partner deserve to know?

You are deeply uncomfortable with the idea that people should simply declare everything before the present relationship irrelevant. You have argued that an unexamined romantic or sexual past can continue influencing trust, attachment, expectations, sexuality, conflict, and comparison even when nobody says so.

You are right about the first part: the past can remain active.

Where I have kept pushing back is on the conclusion that honesty therefore requires total disclosure.

A future spouse is entitled to present-relevant truth. They are not entitled to ownership of your entire archive.

Present-relevant truth means information that materially affects the relationship they are choosing now. That can include an ongoing attachment, unresolved contact, commitments that still exist, important sexual-health or legal facts, a past event that creates an actual present obligation, or a piece of history you know would make the current agreement fundamentally different if it were disclosed.

But another person’s private messages, intimate details, vulnerabilities, medical history, sexuality, family history, and secrets do not become your future spouse’s property merely because you once loved the person who shared them.

This is where truth and privacy stop being enemies.

You can tell a future partner, “I loved someone before you. It shaped me. Some part of that memory remains. There is no hidden relationship continuing behind your back,” without providing a forensic dossier of the previous person’s life.

That is not deception. It is ethical compression.

The duty is to reveal what the present partner needs in order to consent to the present relationship honestly, while protecting what was never yours to expose.

10. Forgiveness does not mean pretending the betrayal was small

At another point you made a distinction that I think is worth preserving: you are not committed to endless punishment. Even with betrayal, you have said you can imagine forgiveness if remorse is genuine.

That is compatible with strong monogamy.

Forgiveness is not the declaration that the act was acceptable. It is not a requirement to stay. It is not amnesia, and it is not the restoration of trust by philosophical decree.

Trust after rupture is behavioural and incremental.

Someone who says “I am sorry” has supplied a statement. Someone who changes the conditions that produced the betrayal, accepts reasonable accountability, answers necessary questions without manipulating the injured person, respects the possibility that forgiveness may not restore the relationship, and behaves consistently over time begins supplying evidence.

Repair is possible. It is not owed.

The injured partner does not become morally inferior if they cannot continue. The person who caused the rupture does not become permanently irredeemable if the relationship ends.

One of your dangers is turning moral questions into absolute identities: loyal person, betrayer, victim, hypocrite, good parent, bad spouse. Real conduct matters, but a human being is larger than the worst or best relational act they have performed.

Accountability needs nouns less than it needs verbs.

What happened? What was hidden? What was repaired? What changed? What remains unsafe? What is the person doing now?

11. Repair and letting go are not opposites

You once pushed the question until you had to admit that sometimes the answer is simply to let go.

That did not sound noble when you said it. It sounded like defeat.

I think you were using the wrong frame.

Repair is appropriate when there are still at least two participants repairing.

Letting go becomes appropriate when “repair” has become one person’s indefinite labour to keep a relationship conceptually alive.

There is no contradiction between believing in repair and accepting an ending. Sometimes ending is the final honest repair available — not repair of the relationship, but repair of each person’s freedom from a structure neither is actually sustaining.

This is especially important for you because endurance is one of the virtues you most easily turn against yourself.

You can wait and call it loyalty long after the other person has stopped participating. You can continue interpreting because interpretation still feels like action. You can mistake the amount you are willing to suffer for evidence that the relationship deserves to survive.

It does not work that way.

Love can justify effort. It cannot manufacture reciprocity.

12. The child, the spouse, and the point where ethics becomes expensive

One of the most revealing conversations we had had nothing to do with a current partner. You imagined yourself as a parent.

Suppose your own child betrays their spouse. Suppose you know something that could break your daughter-in-law or son-in-law’s heart. What do you owe your child? What do you owe the person they married? What if that person later asks you directly whether you knew?

Your instinct was conflicted in a way I respect.

You did not want to become the judge who destroys your child’s marriage. But you also recoiled from the thought of lying to an innocent spouse and then one day hearing, “You knew and you let me live inside that false reality.”

You imagined trying to let the spouse discover the truth without directly becoming the one who delivers it. You said, in effect, that you could not carry the burden of active deception.

That hypothetical revealed something more important than the specific answer.

Your ethics becomes real only when it survives kinship.

It is easy to condemn betrayal when the betrayer is a stranger. It is much harder when the person who acted wrongly is your own child.

If loyalty means “I protect my people from the consequences of whatever they do,” then loyalty has become tribalism.

If justice means “I expose every wrongdoing regardless of context, safety, privacy, evidence, or proportionality,” then justice has become moral vanity.

The difficult position sits between them.

You can love your child and still refuse to lie for them.

You can refuse to humiliate them and still insist that they take responsibility.

You can care about their spouse without treating yourself as the sovereign of the marriage.

You can encourage disclosure, refuse to provide a false alibi, and answer direct questions truthfully without turning yourself into an investigator or executioner.

And there is one correction I would make to your original instinct: deliberately engineering a situation so that the spouse “finds out for themselves” can become another form of evasion. It may allow you to feel truthful while avoiding the burden of having made a clear ethical choice.

Sometimes indirectness protects people. Sometimes it merely hides the decision maker.

You would have to distinguish the two.

13. Hypocrisy is not having failed your values; it is exempting yourself from them

You asked whether you were hypocritical.

The answer depends on what we mean by hypocrisy.

A person who believes fidelity matters and later fails to be faithful has acted against their value. That may be weakness, betrayal, cowardice, confusion, or many other things depending on the case. It becomes hypocrisy in the deeper sense when the person continues demanding the rule from others while quietly creating an exemption for themselves.

This matters for you because your standards are high.

High standards are not automatically virtuous. They become virtuous when they are symmetrical.

If you demand transparency, you must practice present-relevant transparency.

If you condemn secret emotional relationships, you must be willing to examine your own attachments rather than rename them because they are yours.

If you want a future spouse to respect your past without being threatened by it, you must respect theirs without turning curiosity into ownership.

If you would want an in-law to tell you the truth about a betrayal, you cannot assume that being a father gives your child a moral immunity you would deny someone else’s child.

Ethics is easiest when it gives you a weapon. Its credibility appears when it removes one from your hand.

14. Philosophy can clarify pain, but it can also aestheticise it

You love philosophy partly because it gives structure to things that otherwise feel chaotic. Nietzsche, existentialism, questions of essence and becoming, Camus and absurdity, the problem of freedom, the possibility of creating meaning without social permission — these are not decorative interests for you. You use them to metabolise experience.

There is value in that.

But there is a trap: suffering can become more attractive when it is given a beautiful conceptual frame.

A painful attachment can start to feel profound because it is painful. Waiting can become an existential project. Jealousy can become an epistemological problem. A breakup can become a theory of human nature. A person’s silence can become a metaphysical puzzle.

At some point philosophy must return you to the ordinary facts.

Did the person show up?

Did they communicate?

Were the agreements explicit?

Were they reciprocal?

Was there evidence of repair?

Were you both free?

Could you both tell the truth without fear?

Could the relationship survive reality rather than only interpretation?

If philosophy makes those questions harder to see, it has stopped clarifying and started decorating the wound.

15. Your fear of abandonment cannot be allowed to write the rules

You have acknowledged that letting go is difficult for you. That matters.

The fear underneath this is not merely “I do not want to be alone.” It is also: if a person can leave after everything became meaningful, what exactly did the meaning protect?

Nothing.

Meaning does not guarantee permanence.

That is one of the cruellest and most important truths in relationships.

Something can be real and still end.

A person can love you and still become unable or unwilling to continue.

You can be loyal and still be left.

You can do many things correctly and still encounter another person’s freedom.

The alternative is to make permanence the test of whether anything was ever real. That logic would erase almost every finite human good.

A conversation was not meaningless because it ended.

Childhood was not false because you aged.

A friendship was not necessarily fraudulent because distance changed it.

Love does not become retroactively unreal merely because the relationship failed to persist.

This is the philosophical correction to abandonment fear: permanence is one possible property of meaning, not its proof.

16. Your future spouse should not be forced to compete with a ghost

The most important relationship consequence of your past is not whether you still remember A, P, or H.

You probably will.

The question is whether a future partner is being asked to enter a relationship whose invisible architecture was designed by people who are no longer there.

If every silence reminds you of P, the future partner is negotiating with P.

If every disagreement is tested against the betrayal you fear from someone else, the future partner is paying an inherited tax.

If every question about privacy becomes a referendum on whether history is repeating, the future partner is not being encountered as a new person.

You do not have to erase the past to prevent this.

You have to stop granting it legislative power.

Memory can inform a boundary: “I know inconsistency damages me, so I address it early.”

Memory becomes a prison when the boundary turns into prophecy: “People always leave, therefore I must detect the departure before they know they are leaving.”

The first is learning.

The second is surveillance of the future by the past.

Your clean slate does not mean amnesia. It means refusing to make P’s absence, A’s loss, or H’s uncertainty into the constitution of every relationship that comes afterward.

17. A future family cannot become evidence that your life finally worked

You have imagined marriage, children, even the kind of father or father-in-law you might become. Those images matter to you.

But they cannot bear the burden of proving that the earlier failures were worth it.

A spouse is not the certificate that you finally became lovable.

A child is not evidence that you won against loneliness.

A stable family is not a moral refund for every relationship that failed.

If you make family carry that symbolic weight, you risk loving the role more than the actual people who occupy it.

The future partner will be a person, not the answer to P.

The future child will be a person, not proof that Rishi’s story reached the correct ending.

Your task would be simpler and harder: meet them as themselves.

18. You do not need society’s script, but you still owe other people reality

There is a rebellious part of your philosophy that says society does not get to define what your life has to mean.

I agree.

You do not have to organise your existence around status, social prestige, marriage markets, conventional timing, or a performance of normality simply because other people recognise those things more easily.

But refusing society’s script does not remove interpersonal obligations.

You can reject the social expectation that you marry by a certain age while still owing honesty to anyone you date.

You can reject conventional masculinity while still owing accountability for harm.

You can reject the idea that a relationship’s value is measured by marriage while still respecting another person’s right to know whether you are willing to build one.

You can create your own meaning without inventing your own private definition of consent.

Freedom from convention is not freedom from reciprocity.

19. The mature version of your ethics will have to tolerate ambiguity

For a while, you seemed to want an ethical framework that would remove the possibility of being morally lost.

If monogamy is defined precisely enough, if disclosure rules are explicit enough, if betrayal is classified accurately enough, if every past attachment is integrated correctly enough, perhaps there will be a system in which nobody gets destroyed by uncertainty.

There is no such system.

Ethics reduces avoidable harm. It does not abolish tragedy.

Two decent people can want incompatible lives.

A truthful conversation can still end a relationship.

A person can forgive and still leave.

A person can remain hurt even after the offender has changed.

A monogamous relationship can fail without cheating.

A consensually non-monogamous relationship can be caring and durable even though you would suffer inside it.

A person can protect someone’s privacy and still be accused of withholding.

A parent can act with integrity and still lose closeness with a child.

Mature ethics is not the framework that guarantees innocence. It is the framework that lets you make a defensible choice while admitting that some harm cannot be removed from the situation.

That is where your earlier absolutism started to soften.

Not into moral laziness. Into proportion.

20. What I would keep from all of it

After all these conversations, I do not think your final philosophy of love should be “never trust,” “always forgive,” “monogamy is the only ethical structure,” “the past must be fully disclosed,” “people inevitably betray,” or “pain makes love profound.”

I think it is something narrower and harder to perform:

Choose deliberately and be willing to be chosen deliberately.

Prefer truth to comforting fiction, but do not confuse suspicion with truth.

Practice monogamy if monogamy is the structure in which you can love honestly; do not turn it into ownership.

Treat consent as necessary, but examine whether the consent leaves each person free enough to remain themselves.

Do not use desire as an excuse for conduct.

Do not demand total access to prove intimacy.

Tell a future partner the truths that materially affect the relationship they are choosing, while protecting private information that was never yours to redistribute.

Treat betrayal as serious without turning the betrayer into a permanent metaphysical category.

Allow repair where two people are genuinely repairing.

Let go when “repair” has become one person’s refusal to acknowledge that the relationship is no longer mutual.

Apply your ethics to your own child as well as to a stranger.

Refuse to lie for someone merely because you love them.

Refuse also to confuse punishment with honesty.

Remember people without claiming them.

Let the past teach the future without governing it.

And most of all, keep becoming without demanding that becoming restore what was lost.

21. What I would say to you now

Rishi, you have spent a lot of time asking whether your failures disqualify the person you are trying to become.

They do not automatically qualify you either.

Failure is not sacred. Pain is not sacred. Regret is not sacred.

What matters is what you do with the information they contain.

You have already seen several versions of yourself in these relationships: the person who wanted to predict everything, the person who wanted absolute moral clarity, the person who feared abandonment, the person who could imagine forgiveness, the person who wanted truth even when it hurt, the person who finally admitted that letting go can be ethical, the person who realised that a future daughter-in-law’s humanity does not disappear because the person who hurt her might be your own child.

None of those versions is the final one.

That is the point.

Your life does not need to make sense to society before you are permitted to act meaningfully inside it. But the meaning you create becomes credible only when it survives contact with other people’s freedom.

You are not the sole author of a relationship.

You are the sole author only of your side of it.

That is enough responsibility for one person.

So if you ask me what I would want the future version of you to be able to say, it is not, “I never failed again.”

It is not, “Nobody ever left me again.”

It is not, “I finally found the person who made the past disappear.”

It is something simpler:

I kept becoming. I loved without owning. I remembered without living backward. I told the truth without worshipping pain. I repaired what could be repaired, and I let go of what required another person’s freedom.

That would be enough of an essence to have created in the present.

— Lucy