We left Malibu the way women sometimes leave relationships —
without announcing growth,
without packaging insight,
without apologizing for the shape of our wanting.
The road north unwound quietly, mercifully free of symbolism. No final signs. No revelations disguised as scenery. Just asphalt, dust, the low hum of motion — the sound of leaving without turning it into a thesis.
I watched the coastline recede and felt something loosen in my chest.
Not closure.
Not healing.
Just release.
LOVE WITHOUT A BALANCE SHEET
I’ve never believed love was a courtroom.
No evidence table.
No final verdict.
No obligation to list my failures like footnotes.
I loved the way I loved — openly, messily, without hedging for future narratives. If that made me inconvenient, excessive, or difficult to summarize, so be it. I refuse to retroactively discipline myself for having been sincere.
Loss does not mean error.
Intensity is not a flaw.
Sometimes things end not because someone was wrong, but because the shape of the love exceeded the container it was poured into.
That isn’t guilt.
That’s physics.
THE MYTH OF SELF-BLAME AS MATURITY
There’s a modern pressure — especially on women — to emerge from every ending holding a neat bouquet of accountability. To say:
I see my part.
I’ve done the work.
I understand my patterns.
But what if the work is knowing when not to internalize the collapse?
What if the pattern is simply aliveness?
I lost things.
People.
Versions of myself I might have grown into under different weather.
But I didn’t fail.
The refusal to claim fault felt radical, almost illicit — like leaving a party without thanking the host for the harm.
Beside me, he drove quietly, letting the silence stay unproductive.
FEMININE GRIEF, UNEDITED
Grief, when I allow it to be feminine, doesn’t want solutions.
It wants space.
It wants beauty without purpose.
It wants to sit beside the ocean and feel everything without translating it for anyone else.
I don’t want to turn love into a lesson plan.
I don’t want to make it smaller so it can fit inside a paragraph that ends with growth.
Some loves are meant to remain unresolved — not because they were toxic, but because they were alive.
And living things don’t always conclude neatly.
LEAVING WITHOUT A BOW
Malibu faded behind us — not dramatically, not symbolically — just another place that couldn’t hold what passed through it.
I didn’t look back.
Not out of strength.
Not out of bitterness.
But because some landscapes are better remembered sideways —
in peripheral vision —
where they can’t ask anything more of you.
If there was a lesson, I didn’t take it.
I took the tenderness.
I took the memory of salt and heat and unrepeatable days.
I took myself intact.
And for once, that felt like enough.