But…

I thought I knew what love was.
What did I know?
Those days are gone forever,
I should just let them go, but…

I wrote those lines down years ago. I thought they marked an ending. I understand now that they marked a condition.

I have been living inside that “but” for longer than I realized.

There are versions of this feeling that demand resolution. One insists that what was lost must be named, challenged, set right. Another looks back and smooths the edges, folding what happened into time, into something explainable, survivable, complete.

I recognize both. I have lived both.

I am no longer interested in choosing between them.

What I feel now is quieter, more stable, but not empty. The urgency has eased, but the truth of it has stayed. I understand what happened. I understand what I gave. I understand what this became.

But.

I will not pretend it did not matter.

There was a time when I had a fierce devotion to librarianship. Not just to the work, but to what I believed it could hold: care, knowledge, relation, a shared commitment to something beyond ourselves. That devotion does not vanish simply because the conditions that once defined it have shifted.

Those days are gone. That much is true.

But I am not willing to rewrite them as insignificant in order to make leaving easier to explain.

I am my scars.

Not as damage. As record. As evidence of what was lived, what was given, what was learned in ways that cannot be translated cleanly into the language of institutions.

I do not need this to resolve.

I do not need the past to return.

I do not need to prove that it was worth it.

I am carrying it forward anyway.

The sentence does not finish.

It does not have to.