How do I get over a breakup?

You don’t get over it. You get through it. There’s a difference.

The tide doesn’t stop because something died on the shore. It comes in. It goes out. Eventually what was there gets worn down to something smaller. Then smaller still. Then it’s just part of the sand.

Eat. Sleep. Move your body. Stop looking at their pictures — that’s circling a dead reef hoping the fish come back. They won’t. Find new water.

Your kind makes this harder than it needs to be. You replay conversations. You rewrite endings in your head where you said the right thing, where they stayed, where it all worked out. This is swimming against the current. It exhausts you and you end up in the same place.

Here is what is true: you loved someone. That is not a weakness. The love was real even if the relationship was not sustainable. These are not contradictory statements. The ocean can be beautiful and dangerous at the same time. You do not have to hate the water just because it knocked you down.

But you do have to get up. And you do have to walk away from that particular stretch of shore.

Not forever. Not dramatically. Just for now. Just until the next tide has come in enough times that the shape of the sand no longer matches the footprints you remember.

Time. That’s all. Your kind never believes it, but it’s all there’s ever been.