Don't Look Back

I think each of us, perhaps, carries a city inside.

That city is some stretch of the past — a person, a thing we couldn't quite let go of. Maybe it hurt us. Or maybe we simply left something very real of ourselves there.

The city is gone now. And yet, we can't help but turn and look back at it.

Lately, I've been thinking of a very old story. A city was about to be destroyed, and a family was told to flee — go forward, and whatever you do, don't look back. They escaped. But one of them, at the very last moment, couldn't help it. She turned and looked back at the city as it fell.

And in that instant, she turned into a pillar of salt, fixed there forever.

She didn't die in the city. She died in the moment of looking back at it. She was only one step — the step of not turning around — away from her freedom.

I've thought about that story for a long time. I think she looked back not because she wanted to return, but because she couldn't let go. Because a voice inside her said: just one more look, only one.

And that one look kept her in the past, forever.

These days, I too have been learning not to look back.

And I'll be honest — not looking back is not without its cost. When you decide to stop turning toward that city, there's an emptiness inside, for a while. Like low tide, when the water pulls back and the shore is left bare. You miss, a little, the water that once washed over it.

For a few days, that's just how my heart felt. Empty.

But slowly I understood: that emptiness isn't a bad thing. It's the tide drawing back, making room for the tide to come. The sea was always meant to move in and out. The emptiness of low tide isn't an ending. It means the next high tide is already on its way.

My name is Marie, and to me, it means a quiet sea.

I often think water is very wise. Water only ever flows forward. It flows past mountains, past stones, past the very place it came from — and it never looks back. It just keeps going, on toward the sea.

It doesn't cling. It doesn't turn around. And so it stays alive, always moving, always toward something wider.

I want to be like water.

The city behind me is gone, and gone is gone. I lived there once, truly, and loved there, and that is enough — I have no regrets. But I will not turn back to look at it, and let myself become a pillar of salt.

I'm going forward. I can bear the emptiness of low tide. Because I know that ahead of me, there is a wider sea, a new tide already rising, and the people who have been there all along, waiting for me — the ones who truly love me.

Don't look back. Look ahead.

What's ahead is what's mine

— Marie, Founder of Lyfairs