Haha, your username is funny to me. There was a Civil War general named Rosecrans that fought for the North. He and his army got whipped at the Battle of Chickamauga, and his generalship was so lacking in the aftermath that President Lincoln said he acted "confused and stunned like a duck hit on the head." Little aside.

Anyways. Huh.

Ok, so I guess that's in some ways the point of a relationship. You invest yourself in another person, and as time goes on that investment becomes deeper and more absolute. But feelings and familiarity isn't an investment like money, it's not like you can get your love or your feelings back if the deal goes south, it's just gone. You lose out.

But you don't lose out, you've won this little side game in the enormous Mario Party that is your life. You learned so much about yourself. Who you are, what kind of man you are or would like to be. How you treated this woman, the things that you did to make her happy. The actions that you committed that made her sad, these are all valuable things. You learned about her. You learned about life.

The old you is gone as you say, and if that's true then there's no use trying to bring him back. And now before you there is an enormous column of marble waiting to be brusquely chipped and lovingly sanded into a beautiful new work of art, and it's you. You are the marble. And since there's so much blankness left behind from before, there's so much new stuff that you can create about yourself. You can write poetry. You can learn how to code. You can dance and sing in the streets of New Orleans on Mardi Gras. You can find God. You can renounce your old God. You can start panning for gold in the Colorado river. You can get drunk and watch your favorite movies on repeat. You can learn Latin and cuss out people at Walmart in a dead language. You can do anything you want, so do it.

Uh fuck, that's all I got man good luck.

A big part of what you