The Moment Before

My carriage crept to the top of the track.  

The wind blew. My body shivered.  

I reached the top, and it halted.  

My seat clicked.  

My body hung limp above the black hole, my life in the hands of a metal safety bar.  

What comes next? 

What was I about to plummet into? 

Would it be quick? 

I closed my eyes and braced for impact.  

Except when I opened them, I wasn’t on a rollercoaster at all.  

I was sat on the end of my bed, staring at the floor, about to end things with him for good.  

He sat behind me, at the head of the bed. Everything we were yet to say lingered in the air in the depths of a silence that had been speaking the words for us. 

The weight in my chest felt heavy. I had already lived through the moments to come a dozen times in my head. 

We had known for a while that something wasn’t working, that something was going to have to give, and that something was going to have to be us. 

But we stayed, and we stayed because staying felt safer than the uncertainty of what was to come next.  

What was to come with the discomfort of losing someone so ingrained in your life and who you had become. 

Staying felt easier – but at what cost? 

Time felt distorted. Not just in that moment, but in the months leading up to a conclusion we had been trying to avoid. We were exhausted, spending our energy trying to fix something beyond repair, letting it bleed into parts of our lives that didn’t need to suffer.  

Ending things felt like a freefall into nothingness because suddenly there was a future that existed without each other in it.   

Choosing to leave had felt like we were losing control, but really, were we just reclaiming it?  

For months, fear had kept us suspended, hovering in a space where nothing could move forward. Letting go wasn’t going to erase the fear, but it would give direction.  

Fear of the unknown became something I could step into, rather than something I was trapped inside. 

Taking control was never about certainty. It was about choosing discomfort over stagnation, and trusting that motion, any motion, was better than staying still. 

So I leant into that fear. 

When it finally happened, it wasn’t violent or dramatic. 

It was fast. 

Clean. 

Slightly painful. 

But then it was done.  

The grief still came, but it came in waves, not all at once.  

I stayed upright. I stayed breathing. 

Quite quickly, the fear turned into motion. The world started moving again.  

Something I had spent months bracing for passed through me in seconds, and it didn't break me.  

Endings can feel like a freefall, but like a rollercoaster, the drop doesn’t last. And once it's over, you realise you weren’t falling at all; you were moving forward.  

And as you keep going, you might even find yourself enjoying the ride.