What a long year it’s been so far, wouldn’t you agree?

My journey has already brought me to the end of an old chapter and the beginning of a new one. And I am exhausted. Happy, optimistic even. But utterly spent.

They say it’s the year of the fire horse – that while last year was about growth and transformation in the year of the snake, right now is the time for action. Well, action I took; now I can sit back and rest for a while as my body catches up to my new reality.

It was something I knew was coming. I had been planning for it for about a year now. But no amount of planning can lessen the amount of physical and mental stamina some moves will demand of you. Sometimes, all you can do is plan enough so the events go smoothly and efficiently. Not necessarily so they’ll be easier. Seems a bit like an oxymoron because it’s one of those things that you won’t understand until you go through it.

For months, I was planning, scheduling, and throwing money at the cause that I knew would leave me drained. But I was happy to do so because it meant being finally one step closer to a good life for me. A life for only me.

And now I’m here, in this new place all alone.

I couldn’t be happier.

But that wasn’t the story this time last month.

This time last month, I was stuck between feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of tasks left for me to accomplish and the expenses that kept piling up. Trailing not far behind that was another feeling I already knew all too well: the feeling of experiencing my ‘lasts’.

As I paced around that old space, taped-up boxes stacked in every corner and on every shelf, I found my mind trying to remember in detail how everything looked before we tore it all down. In sporadic fits of small desperation, I started taking pictures of certain scenes before they were lost permanently. Not good pictures, mind you. Just ones that I could look back on when I needed to remember how it felt to be in that place, if only for a brief moment.

With so many emotions fighting for dominance in me at the time, I could only focus on so much. So, I chose to try to focus on the physical tasks at hand while pushing out the emotions. Knowing myself as well as I do, I knew that wasn’t sustainable. But I had to try, because the things I needed to get done were all time-sensitive, and I couldn’t waste my depleting time on reminiscing. This was something I chose; something I needed. There was no point crying about it now, I told myself.

Wait until you’re gone.

But I couldn’t. I tried, truly, but it’s not that easy for me.

First off, I’m an emotional person. Sensitive to not just my own feelings, but others’ as well. I simply can’t shut off the emotional side of my mind. My emotions are my main driving force behind everything I do, and while I do consult reason and logic from time to time, they’re not in control here. This time in my life was dripping with heavy feelings that I couldn’t just tie up in a neat bow and unpack when the time was ideal. The unpacking was happening in real time.

Secondly, I’m a very nostalgic person. I spend a lot of time thinking about the past, but not in a way that slows me down or to distract myself from what lies ahead. I do it because those moments when I remember what it felt like to be in that room of people who loved me, or to walk through those hallways with friends as we laughed and shared ridiculous stories – those are the times when I remember what it means to be human…to be alive.

I am often looking back into the past, distant and recent, in hopes of finding bits of my own humanity and a life I once lived when everything in my present feels chaotic. It helps me remember who I am.

And during a time like this, where my whole world was changing yet again, and the comfort of familiarity was being threatened, it was oh so natural for my mind to wander back to a time when things felt stable and safe. But when you look back in the past too long or too frequently, it comes with a cost. It’ll drown you if you’re not careful about it.

One way it claims you is by convincing you that you don’t really need to move on. Look how good everything was before it started changing – can’t it just always stay that way? Then you start to see those times only with rose-colored glasses, and suddenly, you can’t remember why you even wanted to leave in the first place. So, you stay.

This was not my problem this time around.

Another way you might be fooled is by the fear of the unknown that lies before you. You’ve never done anything like this before…how do you know you’re strong enough to make it? What if you don’t have enough money, or you’re getting tricked somehow into moving from a good situation into a bad one? What if an emergency happens, and now the people who love and care about you the most are cities away? What if it doesn’t work out?

‘What ifs’ will eat away at your sanity until you’re nothing more than a hollow vessel who’s too afraid of their own shadow to step out into the warmth of the daylight.

But that is not where I faltered either. What held my heart back from the joy and freedom of what was to come was thinking about all the ‘lasts’ I still had to experience here first.

This always has been, and will always be, my least favorite part of leaving.

Having your last moments before everything changes is a special kind of heartbreak. Bittersweet to the core.

In moments when I should be enjoying the time I have left, I’m stuck with the quiet thought plaguing the back of my mind: “This is the last time. It will never be like this again…”

The first time I experienced this was when I was in my teens. I was very close with my siblings; bonded for life by the events that traumatized all of us, as well as the love and friendship we shared. Ours was, and still is, a one-of-a-kind relationship.

We had many little rituals between the three of us, which we cherished and held onto for as long as possible. When you’re a kid, because the only life you’ve ever known is the one you grew up in, it’s easy to feel like that’s all there ever will be to life.

You will always live in that house with that same group of people in the same town. You’ll see the same people you went to school with out and about daily, and stop for a brief, polite sharing of memories of classes you once took together. You figure you’ll end up working at one of the dozens of shops you used to go to when your parents ran errands with a little you in tow. You’ll fall in love with someone you passed by often because one day, when you looked at them like you’d done hundreds of times before, something felt different.

That little life was a whole world of its own. When you’re a kid, it doesn’t seem like you need anything that it hasn’t already given you. So what other life is there?

Until something happens to shatter that naïve vision. In my case, it was my older sister moving out for the first time. I still remember the emptiness I felt inside as I watched her pack her stuff up and leave her childhood bed behind in that two-story, suburban house. She had gone away to college before, so it’s not like her leaving was anything new, I reasoned to myself. But she had always come back on holiday breaks and during the summer back then. She would tell us stories from her adventures, and something became rooted in my mind in those moments, I suppose. My brain secretly made the narrative that it was okay to leave, because we’d always come back to the way things were before.

Until one day, she didn’t come back. Because she had gotten her own apartment, like people having just graduated from college will do. And when she didn’t come back, I wasn’t surprised because I knew what it meant to move out and move on. But that didn’t stop the dark abyss tearing its way through my heart. And though I didn’t know it at the time, I now understand that was my first time grappling with the reality of experiencing our lasts. That was the last time I would ever live with her and see one of my best friends daily. I was happy for her because she escaped. I was devastated inside because it felt like a piece of me was missing. It had always been the three of us. That’s who I became: one part of a whole. But now there were only two left, and I could feel the sand relentlessly falling through the hourglass.

With her gone, my younger sister and I grew even closer in that chaotic environment. We shared many moments, late-night talks, and comforted each other when our parents didn’t notice. We created our own rituals that became our safe havens at the end of the day. One of these came through our shared love for video games. She and I had always shared a room, with my older sister having her own the entire time we lived in that house. When my older sister moved out, I moved into hers, and the remaining children got our own spaces for the first time in our lives.

But that didn’t stop us from sharing in those little rituals anyway.

There was a gaming console in her room, and it became a habit for us to say goodnight to our parents, only for me to sneak into her room at night to play. So as not to alert anyone of us being up well into the night, we turned the sound off on her TV and both listened to our own music in our headphones. You didn’t need the sound of the game to play it anyway, and we quickly developed our own sort of way of communicating in the quiet room. We’d play for a couple of hours, then go to bed. Sometimes we’d talk about what was troubling us, but mostly we did this to unwind together from the stresses. It was like our minds were building these moments that felt never-ending to fend off what would inevitably come. We’d make playful comments to each other, promising we’d beat the other the next night. Because there always was a next night…until there wasn’t.

Normally, as the secondborn, it was natural that I should be the next one to move out. But this is not a normal story because my life has been anything but. I’ve shared before that I was very sick during the teen years of my childhood. This was not the type of sickness that backed off easily, either. I had to put a lot of my life on hold while we tried to deal with my body that seemed to be protesting something we couldn’t see. I was held back, graduating the year after all my former classmates and friends. Forgotten, as they had other life-changing events that they needed to prepare for, and I didn’t blame them. Everyone else had moved on with their lives by the time I was a Senior in high school. I was behind; how isolating that was.

But I was never truly alone because my sister was there with me. And we stuck to our routines and habits because we helped each other this way. I may have been behind, but in a twist of fate, this just meant we had more time together ultimately. I hadn’t been paying attention to her age so much, nor had I seen how close we had become to the time when, like our older sister, she would need to move on, too.

I was still stuck being sick with no end in sight. Nothing in my condition was changing, neither worsening nor improving. I had no physical ability to work, so I had no money. With no money, I obviously couldn’t move out. Thank God my parents loved us deeply and supported me through that time. Though they unintentionally were the cause of a lot of heartache for us, I don’t know where I’d be without them.

But I was so focused on my stagnant position, I didn’t realize how quickly we’d come to the point in my sister’s life where she was ready to take off. Watching her whole Senior year come and go felt like a blur. Before I knew it, she had a college picked out far, far away from that place. Even though I had graduated from high school before her, our starkly contrasting positions in life suddenly made it feel as though she had surpassed me. If we were two pawns on a game board, she had gained a roll that boosted her forward 10 spaces ahead of me, where she had previously always been 4 behind. Before I could process it all happening, we came to our last night together before she left for college the next morning.

So many things were running through my mind that whole day. This was our last breakfast we would cook together. This was the last time we’d sit on the couch in the same spots we always had and watch the same movies for the millionth time. The last time we’d watch the light in the living room darken until one of us was forced to turn on the lamp behind the couch. The last time she would wash dishes, and I’d clean the counters after dinner. The last time we’d say goodnight to our parents together as we headed up the stairs to our rooms. The last night we would spend playing for hours in silence, connected in a way that wouldn’t be obvious to anyone else. The last time we did that racetrack…the last time we did that minigame…the last time we looked at each other and signaled in our own special way, “one more?” after we had fought off the tiredness that was weighing us down for as long as we could.

I remember exactly which game we played last that night, but I don’t remember who won. Winning didn’t matter anyway, because when that final timer counted down on screen from 10 to 0 to end the match, we both felt the unspoken weight that countdown carried off screen as well. When it ended, and the characters stopped moving, time felt frozen for a moment. I didn’t move except to rest my arms on my lap as reality sank in. It was over. It was late. And it was time to go.

Trying to control my breathing, I moved as silently as possible. To move quickly felt like it would solidify what was to come; maybe if I disturbed the environment and space around me as little as possible, I could stop it from reaching that point of no return. But this was the wishful, naïve thinking of the kid in me I had not quite outgrown yet. When I pulled my headphones off my ears and paused my music, she did the same. I turned to her, and she was already looking at me with tears in her eyes. I felt the sting of my own that I couldn’t stop from falling down my face as we both looked at each other and shared in the same thought: this is our last time…and it’s already over.

We hugged and cried in silence that night, still being mindful of the other presences in the house.

Eventually, I got up and helped her put away the controllers and the console, moving in that bonded unity only two connected souls can share. I hugged her tightly one last time and left her room. I don’t remember much about what happened in my own after that, but I have a strong feeling it involved more crying before my body succumbed to the exhaustion I could no longer resist. My parents drove her away early the next morning, and I was left alone for a few days, where I could do nothing but slip into the emotional slump of reliving those moments of our last day.

But that was back when I was a kid – this is now.

Those moments stayed with me throughout my life, and whenever I was particularly missing my sisters, they would all flash through my mind. It would sting, then be soothing, then leave a quiet ache in my heart. The pain of those times of saying goodbye never really goes away. They may dull over time, but even writing about them now, I feel the tears pooling in my eyes. I often wonder why I go back to those moments in my head; why would I want to relive them so often? I realized there must be something there that my brain recognized before I did. Now I had to play catch-up and figure out what it refused to just tell me.

But I don’t have time for that right now…All I could think about (or try to) was the move. The more I tried to push those thoughts out of my head, the harder they rebounded to the surface. They were past experiences, yes, but the emotions of those times were resurrecting now as I prepared to say another goodbye. We had both been feeling it for the past few weeks while trying to actively not say it aloud. It was too depressing to think about, but at the same time, we both needed to talk about it. We just didn’t know how.

Eventually, I knew I had to try not to stress about what was left to do to prepare, and the only way I knew how was to focus on something else. I decided to reflect on those memories and why they were hitting me so hard right now. It had to be more than just the fact that this was an instance where history was repeating itself and my body was preparing me for mental pain; it couldn’t be that easy.

So, I thought about it for a while. For a few days, every free moment in my mind turned back to the meaning of it all right now. Why am I thinking about these last goodbyes as if there’s something new to those stories? I couldn’t change their outcomes. I already knew this was coming again, so what was my mind warning me about? I relived them repeatedly until I found a new connection to them.

The first time I said goodbye to my older sister, it didn’t register in my mind until after she was gone what it meant for her not to be coming back. I didn’t pay attention to any of our lasts that day because some part of me still expected her to return. When she didn’t, I sat trying to remember as much as I could about our last real day together. For the life of me, I still can’t remember a damn thing about that day except for some blurry images of what I assumed must have happened. That has always bugged me, and though it may be hopeless, I know I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to remember our lasts.

When the time came to say goodbye to my younger sister, my mind was too zeroed on our lasts. Obsessed with the idea that I couldn’t miss it this time around, that’s all I could think about that day – the last thing we ate, the last movie we watched, the last game we played. The guilt and madness of not paying close enough attention with my older sister consumed me to the point that everything I did with my younger sister at the time was tainted with the recurring statement: “This is the last time…” I didn’t truly enjoy anything we did that day, because my hyper awareness of every last moment poisoned our fun with anticipatory grief that gave the memories from that day a melancholy tone.

My lasts with my older sister, I don’t remember because I wasn’t paying attention, a regret I can’t seem to put down.

My lasts with my younger sister are permanently distorted by sadness to the point of not being not enjoyable to look back on.

Neither was the correct way to live your last moments, I now concluded.

And suddenly it made sense to me why these thoughts wouldn’t leave me alone now. Yes, this is a similar situation to what I’ve been in before, and you can reason that is the only answer to the question I had: because my brain saw a pattern.

But I know now why my mind kept going back to it. And what’s more, I figured out what it was trying to tell me: Don’t screw it up this time.

There is another way to experience your lasts, I realized while I was standing in the kitchen at 5:30 in the morning brewing my daily cup of drip coffee. You don’t have to be oblivious to them and pretend like they don’t exist in hopes you’ll escape the pain of them. You don’t have to give all your mind to documenting every single second of the last things you did together. You can live in a happy in-between where you are aware of them but not focused on them. You respect your lasts, but you don’t let them rule the narrative of the day.

I can acknowledge that this may be the last time I ever make coffee for someone other than just myself, but I don’t let the thought drown me or make me afraid to move on with the day. I can recognize that whatever we choose to watch tonight is the last thing we’ll enjoy together, while still finding the wherewithal to pay attention and enjoy it.

I can respect the inevitable passage of time while still holding space for myself to be fully present and living that moment.

That’s how I decided to look at this time in my life: as an opportunity to right something I got wrong in the past. I held myself accountable by sharing this revelation with the person, who agreed they didn’t want to look back on our last days together and realize we were just sad the whole time. This was how I healed an old wound in myself that I didn’t realize I had been carrying for so long. And even though I don’t think anyone would look at me and tell me I was wrong for how I handled it in the past, it felt good to finally get it right.

Did it make the goodbye any easier this time around? Of course not.

I don’t think anything ever will.

But it gave me a better understanding of myself and how I interact with difficult moments, as well as how I carry those emotions with me in my life.

Though saying goodbye this time was met with no less tears than before, weeks after the ending, I can look back on it now and say it’s more sweet than bitter. The emotions I feel when I think about our goodbye are still sad and tinged with grief of what was lost, but they no longer carry the familiar pain of guilt that the others did. I think I finally understood it this time around – good thing it only took me 29 years.

Your lasts are difficult to grapple with at times. Loud and demanding, they easily drown out all other feelings and thoughts inside your mind, but it’s not a necessity that they must. To turn your mind away to anything but your last moments when they’re becoming too negative is not an easy thing to do (I’ve only had a 33% success rate with it so far). But to learn how to wrangle them – appreciate their power, then loosen their grip on the reins – that’s when you learn they don’t have to be so daunting. I’ve always had a tight grip on those types of things…afraid that letting go equates losing the meaning of the moment forever. When in reality, sometimes we need to let go so they can fulfill their purpose.

Living your lasts gives meaning to those moments – to remember and feel the things you experienced that day lets you know it meant something to you. It’s not something to be controlled when you fear that you’ll forget; they should be quietly felt as the memories of them rush through you. They may not always be nice or warm, but they will always mean something. Then you take a breath and move on like you’re supposed to do.

I’m not the wisest person out there right now, but I like to think I’ve learned a couple of important things in my life so far.

And if there was any final piece of advice I could give you on the matter, it would be this:

Learn to let go a little – you might be surprised when you look back and see how holding on too tightly may have been holding you back.