People Come in Cycles
I was sitting in chemistry class, taking the subject purely because I need the extra credits, when my mind inevitably wandered somewhere completely unrelated: relationships.
Maybe relationships aren’t actually meant to last forever. Maybe they’re cycles.
Every person we meet creates a cycle with us. It begins, develops, becomes familiar, and eventually – whether because we get bored, something happens, or life simply takes us in different directions – the cycle ends. Then, somehow, we move into another one.
But I started wondering what happens when two people’s cycles aren’t aligned.
Maybe sometimes one person’s cycle ends before the other’s does. One person has already moved on while the other is still standing somewhere in the middle of what they thought was going to continue. And perhaps that’s why we keep thinking about certain people long after they’ve left our lives.
It isn’t necessarily because they were supposed to come back.
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Maybe it’s because our cycle with them hasn’t finished yet.
There’s something strange about realizing that two people can experience the exact same relationship but have completely different endings. One person can close the book while the other is still rereading the last chapter, trying to figure out where everything went wrong.
And maybe closure isn’t always something the other person gives you. Maybe sometimes you have to let your cycle end on your own.
Because people can leave before we’re ready for them to. Their chapter can be finished while ours still has a few pages left.
Eventually, though, you turn the page.
Not because what happened didn’t matter, but because you finally realize that a cycle ending doesn’t mean it was meaningless.
Some people are meant to stay for years. Some for months. Some for a season of your life that you don’t understand until much later.
Maybe that’s what relationships are: not necessarily promises of forever, but cycles we enter, experience, and eventually leave.
And maybe the hardest part is accepting that sometimes the person who ended your cycle isn’t the person who gets to decide when yours ends.
