Wipe the “everyone is moving on” mantra from your lips.
A little hope is enough to end your massive pity party.
Write this phrase by Lara Fabian on your bedroom wall: “ otro amor vendrá” (another love will come).
“Honey”, he gave me as the vodka melted my brain, “You need to get ready to move on ”.
I nod as if he’s shown me how to solve a math equation.
I’m still not in that hopeful place, much less in the mood to be.
But when it comes to moving forward, Samuel has it all on the tip of his tongue.
He taught me that we all have to start somewhere.
It doesn’t matter that we’re still walking through the fog; the defined and clear points of our lives are the distance between São Paulo and Tokyo.
There are endless nights out in bars and the pursuit of pleasure is so high that it can numb us for days.
We can get stressed out due to depression, or we can take all the pills in the closet.
We convince ourselves that we are better people without them.
There is the rule of thirds we must obey: Divide the amount of time we spend with someone in three and the quotient is the amount of time we allow ourselves to grieve.
And yet, in our rooms, we still smell the ones we love.
There really is a place between getting stuck and moving on and there should be a word for it.
But, we can build that place for ourselves.
It can be a place of hope rather than depression or disability.
The road may be foggy, but that doesn’t mean we have no direction.
As long as there is drinking and bouts of insomnia; there will also be friends to support us.
We all grieve in our own way; there is no generic recipe for totally outdoing someone.
Not every person goes through the same phases of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
But when it comes to starting from a lost love, we all have to start somewhere.
My friend Samuel did it.
Samuel’s words, hearing about the vodka effect, remind me of Aunt May in “Spider-Man”.
At the end of “The Amazing Spider-Man 2”, she was holding a box full of Uncle Ben’s stuff.
Peter asked if she was throwing things away.
She wasn’t.
She said, “I’m going to look one last time… and then I’ll put it where it belongs.”
We all start somewhere.
Perhaps a phrase on the wall will work for now.
Otro amor sells and will be better: “Another love will come and it will be better”.