If it felt empty when it ended, it was empty long before.
Most advice about hard times sounds like fortune cookies. Simple lines that vanish as soon as you hear them. But one stayed with me longer than the rest:
Everything will end.
I didn’t understand it until the first Christmas after my divorce. I was thirty five. Lunch with my family finished early, and I took the bus home because all I kept from that marriage were my clothes, a computer, and a bicycle. And it was super cold, so the bike wasn't an option.
It was five in the evening. The streets were almost empty. The bus was completely empty. I sat there for 40 minutes, the only passenger, watching the world pass in slow motion.
I didn’t feel heartbroken.
I didn’t feel loss.
The truth is, I never felt love in that relationship. I only understood that later. At the time, it felt practical. Easy. A shortcut to comfort. No real struggle, no real depth. Something that looked stable from the outside and asked nothing from me on the inside.
So the feeling that hit me on that bus wasn’t about her. It was about me. It was the realisation that I had built a life on something that wasn’t solid. Something I had chosen because it was simple, and then watched crumble for the same reason.
What I felt was not sadness. It was a kind of emptiness that comes when a part of your life ends and you have nothing meaningful to hold onto in its place.
And that emptiness felt permanent.
It felt like a new baseline I would have to live with.
Today that moment feels far away. The loneliness didn’t stay. The fear didn’t stay. Even the sense of failure faded once time started moving again. What I thought was forever was just a temporary stop.
The lesson wasn’t about finding someone new or rebuilding quickly. It was about seeing that every storm has an end, even when you cannot imagine one from the inside. Pain does not last because you force your way out of it. It ends because life keeps shifting and eventually you find yourself in a different chapter.
What ended that Christmas wasn’t a relationship. It was the belief that pain is permanent. Once that belief cracked, everything else became easier to face.
Hard days still came, but they stopped feeling like a verdict. They became something to walk through, not something to fear.
If you are in a low point now, it will change. Not because life magically fixes itself, but because no feeling stays still long enough to define you. And if you are in a good place now, that will change too. Not as a threat, but as a reminder that everything moves.
The real skill is learning how to live inside that movement. Let the good days be good without clinging. Let the hard days be hard without assuming they’re permanent. Both shape you. Both matter.
Everything ends. The highs. The lows. The versions of you that collapse. The versions that rise after.
And when the next storm comes, you won’t panic the same way. You’ll remember that a younger version of you already survived something you thought would last forever.
That is the quiet gift of time.
Not that life becomes easier.
But that you become steadier.
Time doesn’t heal everything. It just puts things back in the right size.