Ars oblivia

Well, this title would have disgusted the younger version of me. If you would’ve asked me a few years ago what I thought of people who gave up, I would’ve called them impatient or selfish. I had somehow convinced myself that anything worth cherishing deserved to be fought for until one side survives. Friendships, relationships, people and even ideas if they had once mattered, then surely, they deserved another attempt. Somewhere along the way I had mistaken perseverance for virtue, as if willingness to endure was itself proof that what I was enduring was worth it. Looking back, I don’t think I was protecting the people I loved. I was protecting the version of myself that couldn’t bear the thought of being someone who gave up. The strange thing about one-sided relationships is that they almost never begin that way. Nobody walks into a friendship thinking they’ll be the only one carrying it. It happens so gradually that you barely notice the balance shifting. You text first because they’re busy. You make plans because life gets in the way. You excuse forgotten birthdays because everyone forgets things. You tell yourself that people show affection differently and that expectations ruin relationships anyway. Each explanation makers perfect sense on its own, which is why it takes so long to notice that you’ve become responsible for keeping something alive that was never yours alone to maintain. I used to believe that effort compounds. If I understood people enough, forgave enough, stayed patient enough, eventually that effort would circle back. It felt almost mathematical. Surely kindness has its perks. Surely sincerity is contagious. Surely people recognise when someone I am choosing them again. But relationships are not investments, and people are not equations waiting to be solved. Some people cannot reciprocate what you are willing to give, not because they are cruel, but because they never intended to give it in the first place. The hardest part is accepting that this realisation isn’t an accusation against them, nor is it a failure on your part, it is simply reality not willing to negotiate. I think this illusion comes from believing we occupy a larger place in other people’s lives than we actually do. We spend so much time inside our own heads that it becomes difficult to imagine everyone else doing the same thing. We interpret delayed replies as hidden meanings, distant behaviour carefully chosen signals and every silence as though it were somehow about us. Maybe I understand that way of living because I have lived there myself. It is lonely to believe the world revolves around your interactions with it. Every rejection feels deliberate, every disappointment personal but the older I get, the more I realise that most people are not trying to hurt you. They are merely surviving their own stories, just as you are occupied with yours. There is this story from ancient Rome that I keep returning to. When Hannibal invaded Italy, Rome expected its generals to fight with full strength because victory for them meant proving themselves through force. But Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (Yes, I searched up the entire name) refused. He abandoned battles that everyone believed to be fought. He allowed towns to fall if defending them meant losing the army that mattered more. The Romans hated more for it. They mocked him, called him weak, accused him of cowardice because they could see were the battles he refused to fight. But history remembers him differently. Fabius understood something that the people demanding heroics did not. Not every battle deserves your soldiers. Sometimes the greatest act of wisdom is recognising that victory and survival are not always achieved by standing your ground. Sometimes they require walking away before the war consumes everything worth saving.  I wonder how much of life is spent fighting battles that only exist because we cannot accept that they are already over. We convince ourselves that one more conversation will fix things, that one more apology will make someone understand us, that if we can just find the right words, the right timing, the right version of ourselves, everything will become what it once was. But there comes a point where you stop preserving a relationship and start preserving the hope that it might one day resemble the memory you've refused to let die. At that point, you are no longer building something together. You are renovating ruins while the other person has already moved out. Perhaps that is why solitude has become so appealing to me. Not because I have grown cynical, and certainly not because I have stopped loving people. If anything, I think I have started respecting love more. Solitude asks very little of me except honesty. It does not demand that I chase people who have already decided not to walk beside me. It does not ask me to measure my worth by how indispensable I can become in someone else's life. There is an honesty in being alone that I rarely found while constantly trying to convince people to stay. People often talk about the loneliness epidemic as though being alone is the greatest tragedy of our generation. I am no longer convinced. Loneliness is not the absence of people it is the exhausting pursuit of people who have already shown you where you stand. Solitude is something entirely different. It is the quiet acceptance that peace can sometimes be found in empty rooms rather than crowded ones, because an empty room has never made you question whether your presence mattered. I still don't think giving up is easy. Part of me hopes it never becomes easy, because if walking away never hurts, perhaps we never cared to begin with. But I also no longer believe that refusing to give up is always noble. Sometimes it is simply fear disguised as loyalty. Sometimes it is the inability to grieve what has already been lost. Sometimes it is the arrogance of believing that if we sacrifice enough of ourselves, another person will eventually meet us halfway. Maybe the art of giving up has nothing to do with abandoning people. Maybe it is learning to abandon the version of yourself that believes love must always come at the cost of your own peace. And perhaps growing older isn't about becoming less willing to fight for people but becoming wise enough to recognise the battles that no longer deserve your soldiers.