“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

On the day you are faced with the terminal end of your relationship, three truths will manifest. I am yet to completely decipher the sequence in which these truths exist, but I will liken it to a hiker suspended on a top of a hill finding their way back to safety. The terrain is slightly familiar, you have been here before, you’ve come that way already. Take a closer look, you may find the imprint of your feet marking a territory that does not even acknowledge your presence. Do not be too quick to conclude that the mountain loves you since they have no hands. Rather, think that they are silently praying for heavy winds and heavy rains to wash away any evidence that you were ever there and leave accordingly. The same applies for when you think to call the love that lost you and wish for them to complete your sentence, to find the familiarity of their voice at the other end of the line. Think that they are praying for a storm that takes away their memory of you too. A footprint in the sand, the emptiness of a voice that used to own your heart: same difference.

The process of healing from heartbreak is like going back on a trail that you have just left. Perhaps during your first trip, you found a tree under whose shade you rested while you were lost. The tree symbolises what the relationship once stood for; a place of solace, comfort and rest. However, if you find the same tree again when you're trying to find your way out, it means that you are lost. One of the three truths is that you will be lost.

Another truth is that you will be spoilt for choice between the parts of the hill that makes it possible to successfully climb down or the steep part that plunges you to a deathly fall. The former, though plausible, has lost the novelty of being a good route since you already used it once: climbing up. The latter begets additional choices: will you fall, or will you go back? There are no right options. I am not properly versed in helping anyone navigate a terrain as dangerous as a broken heart. The honest truth is that you will go back. I will be there to justify the reasons for you: back is the humility of finding the trail that you climbed up from, the tree for shade, or finding the parts of yourself in the footprint in the sand. While in the loop of going back you will face the third truth while tethered at the steep edge of the hill: you will wish you were dead.

Here young hiker, wherever you find yourself after the initial exhilarating thrill of the climb has ebbed into a treacherous walk, remember to do something different or else you will go insane.