Dear David,
We haven’t had any communication in a while, and it’s given me time I needed to think.

Remember when you said we should live with each other and be unhappy so we could be happy? Consider it a testimony to how much I love you that I spent so long pouring myself into that offer, trying to make it work.

But my friend took me to the most amazing place the other day, it’s called the Augusteum. Octavian Augustus built it to house his remains. When the barbarians came, they trashed it along with everything else. The great Augustus, Rome’s first true great Emperor, how could he have imagined that Rome, the whole world as far as he was concerned, would one day be in ruins?

It’s one of the quietest and loneliest places in Rome. The city has grown up, around it over centuries, feels like a precious womb, like a heartache you won’t let go of…as it hurts too good. We all want things to stay the same, David. Settle for living in misery because we’re afraid of change, of things crumbling to ruins.

Then I looked around this place, at the chaos it’s endured, the way it’s been adapted, burnt, pillaged then found a way to build itself back up again and I was reassured. Maybe my life hasn’t been so chaotic, it’s just the world that is and the only real trap is getting attached to any of it.

Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.

Even in this eternal city, the Augusteum showed me that we must always be prepared for endless waves of transformation.

Both of us deserve better than staying together because we’re afraid we’ll be destroyed if we don’t.

Elizabeth Gilbert (Julia Roberts), Eat, Pray, Love

https://