The end always begins the same way.

"I'm sorry, this isn't working anymore. It's not you, it's me. We can still be friends."

Or something along those lines. And then there's one last tender hug or kiss before the two of you part. Sometimes there's nothing at all save for a blank glance.

And then there's nothing. So begins the arduous and painful process of detangling someone from your life. Someone who used to occupy your every thought is relocated to every third, to every fifth, until finally their name no longer embosses itself in your head. They are merely a ghost of a notion of a person and you can no longer remember how warm their eyes grew whenever they looked at you.

Time passes and you meet someone new. They seem inoffensive, delightful, exuberant. No warning signs just yet. You start devoting more and more of yourself until you slip and find yourself in a relationship again. But this time it's fine. It won't end like the other one.

Right?

Until you're walking with them down the street and the smell of ivory soap surrounds you, flooding your mind with how the last one held you close on your best friend's couch and how you buried your nose in their freshly laundered shirt. Your palms are sweaty but you keep on walking. The new one grips your hand slightly as if they're afraid of losing you; truthfully, you've been lost for a long time.

You're playing music you don't listen to anyone else with in the car, the two of you bellowing at the top of your lungs. This is fine, you say to yourself, we're happy. A certain acoustic song starts to play, those first three chords haunting and all too familiar. The melody wraps itself in a suffocating clutch around your heart and suddenly, you're not singing anymore. The memory of late night calls with music distantly playing in the background creates a hard lump in the back of your throat that won't dissolve no matter how many times you try to swallow it down.

The new one senses the change in atmosphere and asks you what's wrong. You look away and watch the trees blur into barely decipherable dark brown blotches across the window. Or maybe they're blurring because of the amount of water welling up in the corners of your eyes, threatening to pour down and expose you right here and now. You say you feel sick and want to go home.

They drop you off, concern etched in every line across their face and say they hope you feel better. You barely nod, just stumble through the front door before racing to your room to let the tears drip freely. You grab your phone and it takes you 10 minutes to find the old one's social media accounts—they blocked you on everything. You use a fake account and what you find leaves you wheezing. There's another one. They moved on from you. Your replacement is fairly attractive and bland—they are not you, but apparently, they'll do.

You fight the urge to text them, to drop back into their lives uninvited. Too much time had passed for either of you to be reintroduced into that world of hurt. You had someone else—why did this pain feel so fresh?

Our memories are the biggest liars and convince us that things were better than they actually were. We'll destroy our present just for a taste of our rosy past. Living in the past is the best form of self-destruction since you'll never have to truly live.