Siddharth Kumar

For a long time, you believed closure was an intellectual destination. You treated it as something that could be reached through enough inquiry, enough emotional labour, enough willingness to look at yourself with ruthless honesty. You read everything that promised understanding, translated feelings into language, returned to conversations that exhausted you, and kept asking for explanations as though meaning could be arrived at if you just stayed long enough.

You believed that pain becomes bearable when it is acknowledged by the person who caused it. That there is a certain order to the emotional universe, if someone sees the depth of your wound, if they understand what their choice did to your sense of safety, if they recognise the fracture they introduced into your life, then somewhere within that recognition lies the beginning of closure.

You were really searching for coherence and not closure. Coherence in a version of reality in which love, trust, hurt, accountability and justice could all exist together without cancelling one another out.

But what if the person who caused the hurt did say that you did not deserve it and that they were not indifferent to your suffering? And yet they also believed, with absolute clarity, that what they had done was right for them, that they did not regret the choice, and that in the same circumstances they would make it again.

Your pain is real. You did not deserve it. But their decision remains valid.

Such conflict creates a form of grief for which there is very little language, because everyone is taught that if someone truly cares, they will not be able to live peacefully with the knowledge that they hurt you.

This is where the search for closure begins to collapse, because everyone is taught that acknowledgement and regret are inseparable. It is assumed that if someone truly understands the magnitude of your hurt, they must also revise their judgment of the act that caused it. When that does not happen, you are left facing a much more destabilising truth: two realities can coexist, and love does not guarantee their alignment.

Later, you begin, slowly and unconsciously, turning their certainty about their decisions and acts into a commentary on your inadequacy and self-worth. If they could see your pain and still stand by their decision, then perhaps you had failed in some essential way. You were not a person who deserved to be chosen. For someone who thought you didn’t deserve such pain, wouldn’t give it to you. Maybe you weren’t worth it. It felt easier to believe that you were insufficient in multiple ways and unworthy of being chosen than to accept that you could be left behind for something that felt more right to them.

There is a peculiar violence in this kind of self-interrogation. You were trying to construct a version of yourself that would make their choice rational and therefore less unbearable for you. But the truth is that someone else’s choice does not need to be morally wrong for your pain to be real, and your pain does not need to invalidate their experience of love for your dignity to remain intact.

Everyone is taught to understand betrayal as something that happens in the absence of compassion. Yet it is entirely possible for someone to hold compassion for the wound they caused and still believe that following their own emotional truth was the most honest act available to them. Maybe that makes the experience more devastating, because it removes the simplicity of blame.

You kept returning to them with questions, trying to restore a shared moral language. You wanted them to see the event not just as a personal decision, but as something that carried ethical weight between you. They, however, experienced it as an authentic movement toward what felt true in their life. Between those two interpretations lies a space where closure cannot be achieved, because closure requires a shared understanding of what has been lost. But their consistency is the answer. They have already given you closure, not in the form you wanted, but in the form of a final and unchanging truth.

You were searching for closure in the form of an agreement. You wanted your interpretations of the past to converge so you wouldn’t have to carry a reality you experienced only that way. But closure is not agreement. It is the acceptance of irreconcilable perspectives without translating that irreconcilability into a judgment about your own worth.

The real wound was that you could not fit their compassion for you and their choice to leave into the same emotional framework. You thought one had to cancel the other. You thought that if they had truly cared about you, the decision would have been impossible. But human beings are capable of multiple, conflicting truths, and love does not always conform to the moral symmetry everyone expects of it.

Closure does not come from the moment when their explanation finally satisfies you. It is the moment when you stop asking for their explanation and take on the responsibility of restoring your sense of self. Closure begins, perhaps, at the point where you allow both things to be true at the same time: that you were deeply hurt in ways that altered your sense of self, and that their decision was not an act designed to destroy you but an act designed to move toward what they believed was their truth.

In that space, the need to interrogate yourself begins to loosen. The need to revisit every conversation, every memory, every perceived flaw, starts to fade. Not because you finally understand them, but because you no longer need their understanding to repair your own existence.

And perhaps the beginning of closure lies not in understanding them, but in allowing yourself to stop trying to make your moral language and theirs translate into each other. They will continue to live in a reality where their decision was right. And you must learn to live in a reality where your pain is meaningful even without their regret.

You were not wrong to seek meaning. You were only seeking it in a place where your meanings had already diverged.