I’m sat down, staring at my hands, having just put the phone down after hearing his voice for the last time. I do not feel anything apart from this void; I only hear the silence of loss – the kind of emptiness and silence after even the credits of the movie have ended. The next thing I know, I’m in between being asleep and waking up – the split second of complete ignorance. Then I wake up, reality sets in, and there’s a splitting pain in my chest when I glance at my phone – no good morning messages. Possibly no more messages from him ever again. I am immobilised, and for the next few days, weeks, I hardly sleep. I hardly eat.
A year passes, and I’m having tea with my friends on a rainy, cool afternoon or maybe I’m walking my dog on a Sunday morning. I feel my phone buzz. I look down and it’s a message from him. He’s telling me he finally tried that restaurant we read that raving review about, and it was pretty good. He’s wondering how I’m doing. Coffee next week? I reply, then it turns into a full conversation, which ends in “It’s good to talk to you again.”
That’s when I knew. It didn’t hurt to talk to him, it felt like talking to an old friend. It didn’t send my stomach into knots when he casually mentioned how his best friend introduced this girl to him because she, too, was into his weird taste in music. It was fine seeing his name pop up on my phone. It didn’t make me giddy. It almost felt normal. That’s when I knew I’d healed. He was such a big part of my life for so long, even after he’d left, but now – he was just another person.
For months, I had tried so hard to force him out of my mind but he’d still wriggle his way in every now and then. But suddenly, I stopped thinking about him entirely. Through the pain, the times I almost picked up the phone to call him, the easier days and the eventual good ones, I had learnt and experienced so much.
2. I became a better person, on the whole. During a troubling and tumultuous relationship, you often find yourself morphing into somebody your parents, your friends, even you don’t recognise. Whether it’s negativity stemming from the problems you’re facing, or toxicity from the other person, it changes the way you act and react. You don’t realise it till you take a few steps back, and when you do – you’ll see. Sometimes it takes cutting the chord on something or someone that’s pulling you down to find your way back again.
3. I learnt that loving someone and loving the idea of someone are two completely different things. It may seem cliché, and you’d think when faced with a situation, you would be able to differentiate the two. I thought so too. When I was a young girl, I used to dream about my ‘Prince Charming’ – he would be (literally, I do not kid) tall, dark and handsome. He would be intelligent and funny, and sweep me off my feet the moment I saw him from across the room. We would share our secrets and go on adventures together. Pretty lame, I know, but when I met my then boyfriend for the first time, it was exactly what 10-year-old me dreamed it would be. A lot of the relationship was. But a lot of it also wasn’t, through his fault and mine. It took me ending the relationship (at my wits end), to realise I had held on for so long because a substantial part of me wanted to believe we were perfect together even though we were tearing at the seams. I’m still trying to figure it out, but at least I know now that holding on for the sake of saving a doomed fairy tale, doesn’t do anyone any good at all.
4. I learnt that people don’t belong to me, nor do I belong to anyone. I’ve heard it so many times – “You are your own person”. I’ve heard it from my mother, I’ve read it in magazines, I’ve even read it in self-help books. It took a lot more than motherly advice and Cosmopolitan, for me to understand that. After you fall out of love, you realise that no matter how much you want to keep someone you love for yourself, they simply don’t belong to you. You can try to possess every aspect of their lives, but you cannot force them to be yours. On the flipside, you don’t belong to anyone and nobody can force anything on you (apart from our Asian parents but that’s different…) Don’t let anyone dictate who you are. My advice? Make yourself happy, and don’t blame other people who do the same for themselves.
5. I experienced my world crumbling around me. It may seem masochistic but I do not regret experiencing all that agonising pain of a break up. I don’t even regret my bad relationships. You know the saying, ‘From here, the only way is up’? It’s true. Everybody has to hit ground low at some point, and those who don’t, they’re pretty lucky but the rest of us do. Once you survive that, it gets easier to face difficulty head on.
6. I learnt that sometimes, humans suck. You heard it here first. When you’re sixteen and falling in love for the first time, you want to believe the best in people. Don’t worry, when you’re twenty-one, you’d still be struggling to believe so, even when someone has repeatedly ripped your heart out and made a fool out of you. I know I am. Outside of love and relationships, people do horrible things as well. Even we do horrible things ourselves. Once you come to terms with the fact that he or she did that because basically, they could, you’ll stop feeling so betrayed and confused. I’m not saying be guarded against every person you come into contact with, but it won’t hurt if you’re a little more cautious about who you trust.
7. I fell out of love so I could fall in love again. This is the kicker. I fell out of love so I could fall in love, all over again. Ironic, don’t you think? Having scraped what was left of me off the floor only to put the fragile pieces in the hands of someone new. It’s a risk, I must warn you, but it could also be the best thing to happen to you. Just because your previous relationship (or five) went up in flames, doesn’t mean you should give up. Every time you fall in love, it’s a new experience, peppered with idiosyncrasies unique to that relationship. So- pick yourself up off the floor and try again. We go again. It’s the only way we know how.
