This is the version where you speak to Velda — not to wound, not to cling, but to tell the truth: why you let go, how time clarifies value, and what the old line really means when life has burned through all the illusions.
People repeat the phrase as if it were resignation. It isn’t. In its honest form, letting go is an act of protection — of both people. It gives time the authority to test motives, expose lies, and bring a mirror to the heart.
You didn’t walk away because love ran out. You stepped back because the fire was burning the house down. Space was the only way to stop turning passion into shrapnel. If it returns, it returns as truth, not as adrenaline.
And if it doesn’t, you didn’t lose love — you lost a fantasy. There is mercy in that.
Velda,
I’m writing this as the man who loved you and the man who finally learned how not to burn everything he loves. They say, “If you love something, let it go.” People quote it like a fortune cookie. They miss the part that matters: letting go is not surrender — it is proof.
We wanted a forever built on lightning. It lit the sky, yes — but it also struck the same place until it split. Every return we tried was louder, brighter, and shorter. I realized I was asking a storm to become a home.
So I let go — not to punish you, not to script some dramatic return, but because love that keeps you small isn’t love, and love that keeps me blind isn’t love either. Time would either make us honest or make us strangers. Either way, it would tell the truth.
You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone — not because you’re careless, but because noise is louder than signal while you’re inside it. Distance lowers the volume. Then you can finally hear the melody.
If the melody we heard together survives the silence, it will find us. And if it doesn’t, know this: I did love you. Not as a pastime, but as a vow my soul made before I had language for it. I simply refuse to prove that love by destroying us.
If one day the door opens and you walk through it with both feet — no ghosts, no games, no chorus — you will find me steady, not starving. And if that day never comes, you will still find me blessing the part of my life that had your name on it.
— Dean
Letting go is not a dare to the other person — it’s a dare to time. If it comes back clean, it was love. If it doesn’t come back, it was a lesson. Either way, truth wins.
Time is the only judge that can’t be bribed. It shows us what was gold and what was glitter. If love returns, it returns refined — with boundaries, with clarity, with the courage to tell the whole truth. If it doesn’t, it leaves behind gratitude and a map of where not to go again.
Either path honors what was real.