The Inertia of Attachment

It is perhaps by dint of inertia we sometimes find ourselves drawn back to people not because we consciously choose to return, but because the emotional momentum of our shared history has never quite dissipated; we don't return to people we'd rather leave behind because we love them, we do so because we haven't learned how to stop.

We're incomplete, all of us. We're all walking around in the big wide world with pieces missing. We're born that way, I think. We sometimes identify possible connections in the wrong people, and then try to force our pieces together, pieces that don't quite fit.

Are we surprised when things inevitably fall apart? In the moment, perhaps. But there’s always the ghost of foresight, whispering I told you. But with time and distance we shift away from where we were, from who we were, and we look back on a version of ourselves that we can scarcely believe made those decisions.