it’s been two months and some change since the Modern Ex and I broke up, and I feel like I need to tell the world that I’m OK. Like, really OK.

It surprises the crap out of me how much better I feel because two months ago I would have suspected that in a year and two months I would still be tormented about the end of that relationship. Am I over it? I don’t know, but I do know it’s not tormenting me. And it’s no longer the dominant event that my life is revolving around.

Hindsight really is 20/20, and in this case it may be even clearer. I’ve discovered a tremendous amount of clarity about my relationship with the Modern Ex in the past two months. I won’t get into all the details here because I never got into the inner workings of our relationship here when we were together, and I’m not going to start now. I will boil it down to this, though: we weren’t right for one another. I know why we got together. I know why we stayed together for so long. And now I know why we needed to break up.

In a way, the Modern Ex did me a huge favor by breaking up with me. He realized we weren’t right for one another, and he gave me a second lease on love by letting me go. I now have tremendous respect for him for that. That’s hard for me to admit, but it’s true. I should probably thank him, but I’m not quite to that point yet.

I’ve got a bag of his things that he left at my house and his house key. I had been planning on handing it all off to some mutual friends but hadn’t gotten around to it. Now I’m thinking about trying to give it to him in person as a sort of peace offering. I haven’t seen him in two months, and I don’t really want to see him for a significant amount of time quite yet, but I kind of want to make a gesture of peace. Kind of.

How did I get to this point so quickly? I don’t know. It kind of scares me that I did get here so fast, but I guess I just forced myself to think hard about the past five years. Really, really hard. And I had a few epiphanies.

Certainly my wonderful friends have helped. It’s been so refreshing to be around people who seem to understand me and share my interests and can make me laugh my head off. And I’ve got a manfriend (is that a technical term?) that always seems to appear when I need a smile and gives the kind of hugs that melt my heart.

I’m not going to say I’m healed. I still occasionally have moments when I freak out, though they’re fewer and farther between. The freak outs are rarely about anything specific, I think it’s just my soul still mourning the loss because any relationship that was old enough to be a kindergartner needs to be mourned when it’s through.

Still, I feel better, and that feels good. I feel like a tremendous weight has been lifted from me. And for the first time in quite some time I feel what it is to be happy.