A Breakup Dissected

Catharsis has never been my motivation for writing. Though, as a few of you know, my life changed this year in ways too weird to foretell, I suspect a lot of changes are yet to appear, and there are still a few choppy currents to cross before I'm able to anchor my little dinghy. However, after some guys came up to me to talk about my breakup (and their impending breakups), I decided to write out what I went through.
This was a very difficult undertaking for me, especially considering the fact that I had already gone through the phases described below and would have to relive them in order to map out my post completely.
The background: I broke up with my girlfriend in the month of February this year. It was a milestone in my life which changed my character in a lot of ways, and left a very deep impact on my psyche. It hasn't, however, destroyed my faith in the all-conquering nature of love and all the resident emotions that such faith implies.

There are people you meet in life who love you and in turn are loved by you, whose delicate strands of existence are seemingly irrevocably intertwined with yours, and then one fine day all that is left of them is a rapidly shrinking image on the rearview mirror of the soul.
But you still hear the voices and feel them tugging away gently, sadly, at your heart. And you cry softly to yourself, knowing fully well that all that is left of you with them is a faint memory of a dream that was never to be.
You move away from sorrow and jump into a maelstorm of relationships, negotiating your way from sanctuary to sanctuary, hoping against hope that the love you find will trump the one you lost. You mingle with the Beautiful Ones glittering away in the firmament of the heavens, and hope that their green-tinged shadows shall cross the chasms of space and time that lie between you and Her. Your birthday appears and disappears without a call. You gasp at the systematic way in which she deletes you from her life.
And then you cry some more.
And you curse and you rant, and you forge for yourself a heart of iron, never to be broken again.
But iron rusts, and the poison of hatred flows through your veins, and you stop wondering whether she remembers you at all.
And you declare yourself a master of your own destiny, and you concentrate on conquering the world, having failed to conquer your own heart. You bury yourself in work and carve your name on mountaintops.
And yet, in the dead of the night, you hear Her voice, and you wake up in a cold sweat.

And you remember touch and smell, hot breath and hot kiss, smile on face and cascade of wet hair, soft hands and teddy bears.
You think of teddy bears, and you cry.
You cry, thinking of the first time you talked, lying down on soft grass and looking up at the stars above, holding hands and promising to be together for ever.
You cry, thinking of the last time you saw her, looking out of a train and shouting out to the whole world that she loves you.
You cry because you miss the way she hugged you, the way she sat on your lap, the way her nose turned red when she got angry, the way she'd stand on tiptoes to kiss your forehead, the way she'd curl up whenever she got tickled, the way she sneezed, the way she laughed.
You miss the way she talked, miss the way she held your hand while crossing a road.
You miss her like hell, and you cry your guts out. You weep and you curse your own life.

And then, all of a sudden, there are no more tears to be shed, and no more knives to wound your heart.
You look back to the love you had, the dreams that were dreamt, the chronicles that shall remain unwritten, the songs that shall forever remain unsung.
You look back, and you smile.
And you wave, and you mouth out the words: Thanks for everything.