Two Months After
Tomorrow is actually her birthday. I remember sitting with her on the couch a few months ago trying to juggle our schedules and helping her file vacation so we could finally go on a Disney cruise together to celebrate. I remember talking to her sister and her sister’s boyfriend excitedly on the phone about them potentially joining us. I don’t think any of us had any idea that we would never get the chance to go on that trip. Or maybe deep down we all knew. All I really know for sure is that she’s 1,700 miles away and I’m here in the apartment we used to share together.
I think for this first blog post, I would like to focus on what it’s like now, two months after our break up. Maybe if you stick around you’ll get to hear more about how it all ended in a fiery blaze and the drama that happened. I know some of you readers might be hoping to get that right off the bat!
The difference between the first few weeks and now is night and day. I barely even recognize that version of myself. Most people know that there are five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. What I did not know was that you could skip stages, repeat stages, hit the stages in different order and ping pong back and forth between stages an unlimited number of times. For me, I initially skipped denial and anger, spent several long weeks in bargaining, and then oscillated back and forth between anger and depression. Two months later, I still feel like I am still in between depression and acceptance, with some anger still leftover.
Recovering from this hasn’t been a pretty process. My friends and siblings can attest to that. One particular moment that I don’t think I’ll ever forget is sobbing uncontrollably while my best friend held my hand driving me back home to my parents house from my apartment so I didn’t have to be alone. As someone who never holds someone’s hand unless it’s a romantic relationship, it was quite the experience. That friend and I have agreed to never speak about it out loud again but this is a blog so it doesn’t count. Or another time when I sobbed uncontrollably as I dropped off my other best friend to the airport who decided to stay with me for a week despite having a 3-month old at home. There was quite a bit of uncontrollable sobbing. In all seriousness, my friends saw me at my lowest point, and somehow they’ve all stayed. Two months later, I know what it means to have true friendship and to have an exceptional support system.
The despair I felt initially was quite unbearable. This is something I’m ashamed of but I actually told my friends and family that I wanted to end my life. It wasn’t that I truly wanted my life to end, it was mainly that I wanted the pain to stop. I had poured so much of my time, my energy, and my love into this relationship. I had spent so much time and effort sacrificing for a future that would never happen. We had all these plans for our wedding, our vacations, and even had names for the two kids we planned on having. I was going to propose to her on a beach in Hawaii later this year. Losing all of that was soul and identity shattering. I felt truly hopeless and felt like I didn’t have a purpose anymore. I was grieving not just her, but our future family. Two months later, the grief is still there, but it’s more manageable now—and I have hope for the future again.
Why do I have hope for the future? This is something I truly didn’t think I could have again after the weight of everything that happened. I have hope for the future because in these past two months, I landed a new job in a new city closer to my closest friends and family, I’ve been able to run a 5K without stopping, I’m 75% of the way to being able to complete a MURPH workout, I’ve reconnected with a lot of friends I lost touch with, and my existing relationships with friends and family are deeper than ever. I could have done any number of things to avoid the feelings and just numb myself. I decided instead to pick myself back up and face my new reality head on. The pain and the grief are still there. The rage still sometimes boils my blood. There’s a hole in my heart and soul where she once was. But two months later, the edges have softened and the bleeding has stopped. I can breathe around it now and it doesn’t scream every moment of the day. Some days, it just whispers. Occasionally, it’s silent. I don’t know if it will ever fully close but I’m learning to live with it. I’m learning to live without her.
As I wrap up this first blog post, I’ll leave you with my first word of wais-dom: Grief isn’t linear, and healing doesn’t mean forgetting. It means surviving, rebuilding, and slowly learning to breathe again—even with a heart that still aches. That fiery blaze? Let’s just say it involved betrayal, heartbreak, and insanity that you might only read about browsing r/breakups on Reddit. But we’ll get there.
