Everything that has ever happened to you is yours to keep. You own it. No one can ever take that away from you. Your experiences, feelings, cities you walked, people you loved, and fights you fought: they're yours and yours only. And every single thing you’ve done and every single person you’ve met will stay with you, grow with you, and it’s these things that slowly build your character. These things make your life story, and you will only lose the things you actively decide to let go of. You can leave someone without leaving them behind. You can keep the warm, safe feeling of loving someone without wanting to be with them anymore. You can keep your love for someone, even when they say they don’t love you anymore. Think about it: what’s beautiful about human relationships is the feeling we get from them. Think about a time in your life when you were hopelessly in love with someone, romantically or as a friend: you had so much love for this person! It filled you up with energy and heat, made you smile and sing, and the thought of this person being alive made you feel both calm and excited and most of all just grateful. Maybe something happened. Maybe that person decided to leave you, maybe you decided to leave her or him, or maybe it was a mutual decision to simply move on. Either way, it was not the other person that created that feeling of love and warmth inside of you, YOU created that for yourself. You let yourself feel love, for this person, but you can let yourself feel love for anything and anyone, life or yourself even, at all times. No one can take the feeling of being in love away from you. It comes from you. You can carry a gratitude of hope and safety with you, even though you have physically left him or her behind. You can say goodbye to people without losing the beauty they gave you.