When Silence Comes Back to Life

Previously,​‍​‌‍​‍‌​‍​‌‍​‍‌ we assumed heartbreak was a straightforward kind of thing—two broken people sitting opposite each other in a cafe, shivering voices, hands holding cold cups, the goodbye an inarticulate labor of words such as "I'm sorry", "I hope you find someone better." That is the way our parents recount their stories.

Love is finished face to face, look in the eye. Everything was said. No echoing chambers of the messages that weren’t read, no dopamine gambling of "typing…" bubbles that didn’t show.

But Gen-Z doesn’t get out of relationships like that. We disappear. We ghost. Like a dropped call under a tunnel, we vanish mid-sentence. One evening, it’s "goodnight, can’t wait to see you tomorrow", and at dawn, you are looking at a grey Delivered tag which never changes to Read.

The silence turns out to be the loudest thing you have ever experienced. The body, not the mind, reacts to the shock—heartbeat racing, fingers tapping on the thread again and again, trying to find the fissure which you never saw coming.

Ghosting is no longer a way to end things; it merely leaves them hanging. As a result, there is then blocking, a digital metaphor of shutting a door and installing nails in the frame. With a single motion, they remove you: "User Not Found." Instagram, no more. Spotify blends undone, the playlist you made together now dominated by the songs you cannot listen to without the chest tightening. It is like witnessing a funeral you were not aware you had to attend.

You scan through the old screenshots, trying to find the exact moment they stopped choosing you. Was it the night after the fight about nothing? Was it when you said that you didn’t know how to love gently? Was it the moment when they saw that they could hurt you and you would still stay?

You look at the blocked notification and feel your identity scatter. How can someone who once carefully followed your breathing now act as if you don’t exist?

But this generation is clueless about the concept of ending. We merely know how to pause. After weeks or months, when they are bored, lonely, curious, or nostalgic, they soft-return. It could be as subtle as a follow request. A photo from three months ago could be liked. Random "how have you been?" at 1:47 AM. Or, they see every story but never talk. It is an emotional whiplash pretending to be love.

You feel butterflies in your stomach, your hands tremble, and your brain creates scenarios for conversations that will never take place. You feel like shouting at them: Why now? Why again? Why can’t you let me heal?

However, they come back like visitors to their own past, not dwellers who are rebuilding a home. They desire access without accountability, intimacy without effort, romance without responsibility.

And we permit them. Because what we really want is not love, we want the relief of not being left again. We want the serotonin hit that comes like a drug, even if it tears us apart every time.

Maybe the reality is that Gen-Z simply didn’t grasp the concept of ending things since everything we cherish is stored forever, pictures to remember, message archives, backups that bring back the dead. We are trapped in endless loops, constantly rereading the old threads as if they were holy books, asking for the closure that we will never get.

Our parents had Polaroids that faded. We have screenshots that are immortal. They severed the ties. We keep refreshing timelines. They moved on. We recycle heartbreak like a rerun that we don’t know how to stop watching.

Ghosting, blocking, then soft-returning is not contemporary love. It is emotional self-harm masquerading as romance. The only way out is by choosing an ending rather than waiting for a return that only brings you back to the ​‍​‌‍​‍‌​‍​‌‍​‍‌storm.