Eventually

While talking to a heartbroken friend recently, I tried to remember the last time I went through my own heartbreak. I wanted to sift through the memories and dredge up what enlightenment I could, to share it with someone who needed a guide to the land of Eventually -- as in, that place where you get over a lover eventually.

I felt bad when my own recollections came up short. As clearly as my mind could recount the instances, my heart just couldn't conjure up the pain. And how do I help a friend navigate Heartbreak when the terrain had become a stranger?

Later, I wondered: Could it be that even after surviving my own bout with being broken, I had ended up with nothing, not even a single piece of wisdom, to give?

Much later, I realized: Yes, and no.

I know that I have arrived at my personal Eventually, that better future I had desperately hoped to wake up to one day. It had taken a slow, painstaking arriving -- days, and weeks, and months, and years -- but all that really matters now is that I am here.

Everything I had worried over and over about, like the guilt over leaving or the stress over the mistake I was possibly making, they all had, indeed, led me to nothing. But it is a beautiful kind of nothing where anything can begin and end up wonderfully or everything can begin all over again and end so differently.

And, after all that, I am left with only one remotely wise and possibly comforting thing to say to my friend.

If getting to Eventually still looks hazy, be sure of one thing: I am here.