How do you move on?

How do you say goodbye to someone who changed everything you know about life?

It's been 5 years since she died. 5 years of wanting just one more... one more look, one more word, one more kiss. How do you move on? How do you tell yourself to accept it? That she's gone. Her memory is like a knife in my chest, my empty chest.

I go about life, losing myself in work and seeing friends, all the while telling them that I'm fine. Who am I kidding? I haven't been fine for a while, I've never been fine. I have always been on the edge of falling apart, the damaged one. Damaged by my childhood, my abusive father, my abandoning mother. Damaged by my choice of faction, damaged by my fears. Damaged. Until her. I was on the verge of giving in until she happened. The stiff, the first jumper, she pulled me back from the edge. It had to be her. The girl who fought so hard to be dauntless but who was in every respect already brave; who was, at her truest self, abnegation at heart and perceptive as Erudite, she made me complete. Her existence gave my life meaning and now she's gone. How do you move on?

5 years later and I'm still asking the same question, still aching for her, still wishing it was all a bad dream, that she's not gone from this world, that I will never see her smile again or feel her heartbeat or see that fire in her eyes. How do you move on?

I thought I was damaged before. There are no words for what I am now. I don't know the man I've become... without her. Her death shattered me beyond any beating my father ever gave me. Beyond any emotion I felt when I found out my mother had left me. Her death broke me, damaged implies you can be fixed and I have gone beyond repair.

Sometimes the thought will jump into my mind but I immediately dismiss it, she would be so disappointed if I ever even considered for a second to take my life. Not just because I lectured her endlessly on her reckless behaviour and her carelessness with her life but because she knows I could never do something so selfish. Although, who could I possibly hurt if I did... my friends, she would say, my mother.

She wouldn't be very happy if she saw me now.. I was never one to sulk but 5 years without her has left a hole where my heart should be. A hole that can never be mended. She's taken it with her. How do you move on?

I go to places we've been before. I keep her memory alive. As painful as the memories are, more painful would be to forget them, to forget every moment I spent with her. So I watch her climbing the Ferris wheel, walking into Erudite to surrender herself as divergent, I watch her climbing over the wall with me, and stepping over the edge to jump into the unknown of dauntless headquarters.

I stand on the roof where she once stood, wondering what was going through her mind. The first jumper... I laugh.

How could she be anything but dauntless. Her bravery was unfathomable. She told me about her test results once, right after I found out that she was divergent. She told me how she'd tested positive for dauntless, erudite and abnegation, the faction she felt she never belonged to, because she wasn't selfless. I laugh again.

She chose dauntless because she wanted to be free, yet dauntless constricted her even further then she thought abnegation had. She would never fit in there. The freedom she sought could never be found within other factions, her freedom was in that she was more then just brave, she was divergent.

I breath deeply.

Of course. Of course she would sacrifice herself. Of course she would die for her brother. She loved him enough to die for him, even after his betrayal. Faction before blood never existed for her. She might have chosen dauntless for herself but she never chose dauntless over her family. She loved and fought for them because she couldn't be tied down to one thing, she went against her very nature.

I ache for her like I do every day. I ache to hold her. I sigh, knowing what I must do.

I stand on the ledge, below me is the net ready to catch me but I still can't fight the fear that grips me and paralises my body. But I have to do this. I take a deep breath and tell her I love her, I tell her that she will always be a part of me, that I will never forget her and then I jump. The last clear thought in head is her voice saying be brave Tobias.

As I'm falling through the air I realise this I how I've been feeling for the last 5 years. Like I've been holding my breath, like I'm not ready for the next step, the unknown. But then my body hits the net and I'm engulfed by something that i know all too well: life is made of choices. Choosing where to belong, choosing who to be, choosing who to love, choosing how to live...

It's in this moment where her memory doesn't hit me like a knife in my chest, it engulfs me like the net and I am beyond grateful that she chose to jump.