Finding Light After Darkness

I never knew silence could be so loud.

The day he left, the apartment seemed to inhale and never exhale again. The walls felt tighter, as if they, too, were trying to hold in tears. I sat on the edge of the bed for what might’ve been minutes or hours, still holding the mug of coffee I’d made for both of us—his getting cold on the counter, untouched.

Jake and I had been together for three years. Long enough for routines to become rhythms, for toothbrushes to find permanent homes in each other's bathrooms, for love to feel less like a firework and more like a familiar song.

But familiarity, I learned, is not always the same as forever.

We didn’t end with a scream. No dramatic exits, no thrown plates. Just... stillness. A conversation that started with “I’ve been thinking,” and ended with “I don’t think we’re growing in the same direction.”

And just like that, the person I built my days around became a ghost in my photos and a silence in my weekends.

I didn’t eat much after that. Couldn’t sleep. I deleted our messages, and then cried over the ones I couldn’t bear to delete. I tried distracting myself—friends, wine, long walks, yoga I hated. Nothing stuck. Nothing filled the ache in my chest that pulsed with every heartbeat like a reminder: He is gone. He chose to go.

At some point, people stopped asking how I was. I think they assumed I was better.

I wasn’t.

I was just quieter about it.

Then one day—four months after the break, to be exact—I walked into a bookstore I used to love. I hadn’t been back since we browsed there together, arms brushing in the poetry aisle. I almost turned around. But something made me stay.

I picked up a book on grief. Not the kind you get after someone dies, but the kind you carry when someone leaves and you’re still alive, painfully so. The kind that makes you feel like a ghost in your own life.

In it, there was a line that hit me square in the chest:

“Sometimes the person you miss is not just them, but the version of you that existed when you were with them.”

I sat on the floor and cried right there in the nonfiction section.

And for the first time—it felt okay to be honest. With myself.

Not the kind of honesty you say out loud to convince others you’re healing, but the quiet kind. The kind that admits: Yes, I loved him. Yes, I wanted it to work. Yes, it hurts that it didn’t. And yes—I am still here.

I started journaling. Not beautifully. Just messily. I wrote things like:

“I miss the way he reached for my hand in silence.”

“I hate Sunday mornings now.”

“I feel unlovable and exhausted.”

But then, slowly, the entries changed:

“I made coffee this morning and actually drank it.”

“The sunlight hit my kitchen floor and I smiled.”

“I didn’t think of him until lunchtime.”

And then one day:

“I felt like myself again.”

Healing didn’t come all at once. It never does. It came in tiny rebellions against the ache. It came in long walks with no destination. In laughing too hard at a dumb sitcom. In texting my sister just to say, “I’m okay. Not great, but okay.”

It came in the mirror, too. One morning, I looked at myself and didn’t see someone who was left. I saw someone who stayed—with herself.

I saw me.

Scarred but stronger. Broken, yes, but rebuilding.

And now, months later, I walk into that same bookstore and linger in the poetry aisle alone. I make coffee for one and drink it hot. I dance barefoot in my kitchen. I sleep on both sides of the bed just because I can.

Hope didn’t arrive like a lightning bolt.

It showed up in whispers.

In exhalations.

In the quiet between heartbeats.