There is a Celine Dion song I keep for heartbreak. A New Day Has Come, the remixed version, the one with the beat running underneath it. I have played it for every breakup I have ever had. Both of them.

I can't tell you the exact details of the first time I leaned on it. It was years ago, the first of many rejections it has carried me through since, and most of that stretch sits in fog. The truth is most of my life sat in fog, right up until the last few years, when it finally started to lift. What I remember is the feeling. Walls of rejection, the romantic kind, the family kind, the career kind, sometimes all of them at once, and this song playing straight into the middle of it like it had been written for that exact afternoon.

The last time is clearer. After Karthik. Seven years of us, finally finished. I shut my eyes and cried like someone had installed a tap behind them, and our entire time together played like a slideshow on the inside of my eyelids. The song kept promising a new day was coming. I didn't believe it that night. It came anyway. It always does. That is the whole point of the song, and somehow I forget it every single time.

I'm playing it again today.

Not a breakup this time. Something smaller. A door that closed before it had properly opened. We'll call him Banana, because he is not getting his real name in my blog.

It started as nothing. I thought he was cute. That was the entire crime. But there were weeks of mixed signals, a slow drip of warmth and then silence, warmth and then silence, and somewhere in there the uncertainty got its hooks in me. He would do something lovely and then disappear. I kept guessing. Was it there, was it not, was I imagining the whole thing. I was playing a game I was far too naive to be playing, and by the time I noticed, I was already in it.

At some point I realised he was never going to be the one to say it plainly. So I went first.

I recorded a voice note. Forty-five seconds of my actual voice. I told him I meant what I'd said, that I genuinely wanted to know him. And then the part that cost me something. I told him he could say no. If he was too busy, or it simply wasn't there, he only had to tell me and I would leave him alone. No hard feelings. I would not punish him for it.

Then I pressed send.

That was the bravery. Not the wanting. The offering, with the exit door left wide open. I held my heart out on a platter, fully aware that holding your heart out on a platter can also mean the platter slipping, the heart hitting the floor, your own actual flesh gasping for air among the broken china.

Okay. I'm exaggerating slightly.

But I did it knowing he could refuse. Knowing he could even lie and tell me there was nothing there, despite everything he had shown me. It cornered him, gently. No more grey area to hide in. No more plausible deniability. Commit, or close the door.

He closed the door. Distance. A brutal schedule. No time, no room for anything outside it. Whatever the real reason was underneath the stated ones, it came to the same thing. It was resolved.

My friends had told me he was a jerk. Hot and cold, they said. Drop him, don't engage, don't waste it on him. They were right. I should have listened.

I didn't. And I have no regrets.

Here is the part I actually want to write about, because it's new for me. For most of my life, this is the moment where I quietly turn him into a villain. I'm good at it. I'm usually even correct, which is the dangerous bit. Villainising someone makes getting over them so much easier. You get to decide they were a bad person who didn't deserve your tears, and then you cry the contemptuous kind of tears, the kind that dry faster and leave you feeling powerful instead of small. It works. It just quietly costs you the truth.

Ethan Hawke has a line about loving someone who doesn't love you back. The one who's in love always wins, he says. Not because it's returned, but because to feel anything at all is to be alive. The sun doesn't wait for the grass to be grateful before it shines.

I doubt what I had was anywhere near love. Call it the possibility of it. Either way, the principle holds: you don't win by being loved back, you win by daring to feel at all. For me, that meant being brave. And the only person keeping score is me, which happens to be the one scoreboard that counts, because I'm the one who has to live with myself.

This was the first real test of something I decided at the start of this year. Be deliberate. Be brave. The full story of that resolution is its own post, but Banana was the first time I actually spent it on something that could hurt. The bravery did its job before he ever answered. So when the answer came, and it was a door closing softly, I had nothing to be angry about. I'd already got what I went in for.

Which leaves me here. Getting over Banana, a man I refuse to make a villain.

Because he isn't one. He is a lovely man. He laughs like a child, this sudden boyish delight, and I liked it more than I expected to. He is deep, and quietly brilliant. And that's where the honest grief sits. Not that he wronged me, but that there was clearly more to him, and the door shut before I really got to know him.

I'll own my part too. I looked at him as a project. I saw a man who wasn't taking very good care of himself, and the old caretaker in me sat straight up and filed him under fixable. That reflex was never really about him. It's mine, and I'm learning to keep it on a shorter leash. A person is not a renovation.

He is lovely. And he cannot be mine.

Both true. At the same time. No contradiction to solve, no story to rewrite, no hidden awfulness I need to dig up so the loss makes neater sense. He was lovely, he wasn't mine, and I'm okay.

This, I'm realising, is what the open space is for. I spent a very long time not being permitted to have opinions of my own, so I simply stopped forming them. It has taken an entire season to unlearn that, and the odd gift of unlearning is the wide, empty room it leaves behind. Room to take in new truths. Or old ones I'm only now noticing were true the whole time. This is one of them. You can let someone be good and still let them go.

I've been learning something about grace lately, and Banana turned out to be where I practised it without realising. Grace is given freely. That is the whole nature of it. It is offered with full knowledge of you, it leaves you completely free to refuse it, and it does not punish you or guilt you or quietly rig the outcome if you walk away. That is exactly what I tried to hand him. A real choice. An honest yes or no with no trap built into it. I didn't make him pay for choosing no. I couldn't have, in good conscience, because that same grace was given to me first, long before I had done anything to deserve it. You cannot receive something like that and then go around handing people a counterfeit.

The song is still playing. A new day has come, it keeps insisting, gently, the way it has insisted to me through every wall I have ever stood in front of. This time I believe it. It comes every single morning I open my eyes, carrying every possibility with it, the whole world set out and waiting. I've stopped trying to hold the new days together myself. I just trust the One who keeps sending them.

So let me ask you. The last time someone told you no, did you let them have it cleanly? Or did you reach for the version where they are the villain, because leaving angry hurts so much less than leaving while they were lovely all along?