There comes a moment — and you feel it in the tightening of your chest, in the way your breath hesitates like a bird afraid to leap — when holding on becomes heavier than the weight of the thing itself.
You’ve been carrying it for years: a name, a wound, a photograph you never took but can see every time you close your eyes.
It has grown into you, a second skin sewn in with threads of memory and fear.
But here is the truth they never taught you:
Holding on is not loyalty.
It is not love.
It is the refusal to die the small deaths that make space for rebirth.
Letting go is not polite. It is not the gentle handshake with the past.
It is the tearing of roots from the soil of your ribs.
It is the sound of bone snapping when the old self finally surrenders.
It is destruction — precise, merciless — the kind life demands before it offers you its rarer gifts.
Close your eyes.
Imagine your memories as constellations: sharp, cold, luminous. One by one, they collapse into black holes, pulling your breath into their gravity.
Piece by piece, your mind is dismantled until you are a blank sky.
And then — impossibly — something stirs.
A single spark in the void.
The first heartbeat of a self you have never met.
You taste the air; it tastes like rain on warm stone.
Colours feel edible.
Your skin becomes an antenna, catching signals from a future that has been waiting for you to make space.
Letting go is not forgetting — it is tasting the sweetness of what once was, and then opening yourself wide enough for the wind to pass through.
It is the realisation that you never held them, or it, at all — only a fragment of yourself that no longer fits.
And when you release it, you do not lose.
You become vast.
There comes a point — not in time, but in the marrow — when the orbit breaks, and you are flung beyond the event horizon of your own past.
The relics you carried — the metallic name, the whispering wound, the unbearable image — crumble like ancient statues abandoned to the sea.
Holding on was embalming your soul. You were a museum, when you were meant to be a storm.
The release is violent grace.
Tectonic plates shift beneath your ribs.
Constellations tear apart above you.
In the vacuum where you expected a grave, a star is born.
Taste the stone struck by lightning. Drink the colour of the horizon. Swallow the wind until it howls in your bones.
This is not forgetting — this is the salt of memory dissolving on your tongue, and the wild joy of breathing through the space it leaves behind.
What burns away leaves no emptiness, only a horizon so wide it swallows your old name without echo.
Some feel the seduction of this in their marrow — the lust to die into something infinite.
Some feel their ribcage expand until it contains the very sky.
And you — whoever you are — will stand in the ruins of yourself, tasting the invisible, knowing you have been remade without consent.
The past is not a sanctuary.
It is a weight disguised as a shrine.
We were not born to kneel before its relics. We were born to burn them.
The false nobility of holding on.
The myth that love is proven by clutching the dead.
The lie that letting go is optional.
Letting go is not a choice.
It is a law.
It comes for you as gravity comes for a falling stone, as the tide comes for the shore.
You will be torn free. You will be flung into the mouth of the unknown.
The violent grace of becoming.
The snapping of roots under the ribs.
The collapse of the old self into dust too fine to name.
We will taste the rain on molten rock.
We will drink the colour of the horizon.
We will swallow the wind until it lives in us.
We will not beg for what is gone.
We will not embalm our souls in yesterday.
We will strip ourselves until only the raw, pulsing truth remains:
We are bigger than what we have lost.
Let the constellations of memory collapse into black holes.
Let the names and faces dissolve like salt in the ocean.
Let the ashes of our old selves drift into the mouths of stars.
We will step forward naked, unrecognisable, infinite.
We will breathe the air of the first morning ever made.
We will not look back, for there is nothing there that can contain us.