Sometimes choosing yourself saves your life. But that does not mean the choice comes without grief.
Emperor, there is a toll we pay for walking away.
It does not always arrive when we leave.
Sometimes it arrives years later—after the boundary has been held, after the life has been rebuilt, and after we have finally become strong enough to stop looking back.
Then something happens.
A person becomes sick.
A door closes permanently.
Someone dies.
Time removes the possibility of reconciliation.
Suddenly, you are standing before a decision you already made, asking yourself whether choosing your life made you cruel.
That is the toll.
The toll is not always losing the person.
Sometimes it is losing the possibility that one day they might become who you needed them to be.
I was not grieving the relationship. I was grieving the “what if.”
When I learned my mother had passed, I expected grief to arrive in the way people describe it.
I thought I would remember the good moments.
I thought I would reach for a song, a photograph, or one memory that could hold the weight of what had happened.
But I did not have that.
What came instead was the grief of what could have been.
What if she had loved me differently?
What if I had experienced the version of her my siblings knew?
What if I had one moment of being protected, supported, celebrated, or held?
What if I had not needed to spend so much of my life trying to become good enough for someone who had already decided how she saw me?
I was not mourning the loss of a relationship I possessed.
I was mourning the final loss of its potential.
That is a particular kind of grief.
You are not only saying goodbye to a person.
You are saying goodbye to the future in which the relationship might finally have been repaired.
And because that future can no longer happen, your mind may turn against the choice that allowed you to survive.
Should I have gone back?
Should I have tried one more time?
Was protecting myself selfish?
Did I abandon someone by refusing to abandon myself?
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