‘There’s no good way to say Goodbye’ was coined by a coward.
My Ex’s Brutal Goodbye Was Nothing But An Insult To Injury. I’d have settled for an honest one instead of the seemingly good one.
I stared out of the window as my flight picked up speed for take-off and I felt the lingering sensation of that light brush of his lips against mine, from when I bid him a teary goodbye at the airport gate. “Until next time, love,” he said.
That soft but brief, heartfelt kiss was probably the most divine feeling I’d experienced in a very long time. It took all of me to suppress the ‘I love you’ that was fighting to slip out of my tongue. It had just been a few months since we’d been seeing each other. I realised I’d fallen for him already, there was no stopping it. Maybe I was making the same mistake again. Maybe, I didn’t care. It had been nothing but magic since we first met each other. The idea of us was too good to not be pursued, so come what come may…
Within a few weeks, I texted him “I’m keeping you. You’re mine now.”
I felt like the man of my dreams had crept out while I slept, took me in his arms, and decided to spin my life around. With every touch of his fingers, he healed the scars of traumas I had suffered in a horrific past. People had told me that the right one will be worth all the pain I’ve suffered before. And boy, he was. It was the universe saying, ‘Girl you’ve cried enough. You now deserve to just be showered in love.”
In a dark world where love was forgotten, he walked in bearing the light.
We were together, happy, in a way I had never known I could be. Compensating for my dark and twisted psyche, he was a unicorn, shooting rainbows out of his *ss. His chirpy vibe and cheesy love were contagious. He made me want to love him back with every gesture, every word and every smile. His charm was inescapable and his efforts sincere.
I kind of signed my soul over to him because he seemed like the kind of guy who would handle love with the gentle care that is required. He was easy to be around, to love and he made me feel like I was easy to love too.
I had no plans to fall in love and no idea how to do a relationship. But he taught the broken girl how to make it work. In fact, he made it seem like a long-distance relationship wasn’t work at all. Even with a mere overlap of ten waking hours (owing to opposite work schedules) to connect, he filled my life with love and light. He made the entire relationship seem effortless — all love and no fights or toxic behaviour, none whatsoever.
We loved everything about each other.
And on days we didn’t, our relationship had enough space for the thoughts, feelings and opinions of two people.
He adored stupid little things about me, like how I was a sucker for pasta in candlelight. From how my voice distorted into a baby’s when I was drunk to how I would randomly send him ugly, goofy pictures at any point of the day. A shot of the day’s sky set up as his phone wallpaper was almost a morning ritual. When I replaced mine with a happy picture of us (yes, I was that girl) and told him that one quick glance at my phone brightens up my day, he told me that I’m unbelievably adorable and loveable. To be young and in love, eh?
But when it’s too good to be true, chances are it may not be true
With him, I came out of the shell I had pushed myself into and bloomed not like a flower, but like an entire garden. He made my heart and soul happy in a way that I wanted to be a better me, for both of us. He pushed me, motivated and supported me. He was always there and never did he let me lay low for more than a minute. I thrived in life, in every way.
In the back of my head I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop because that is how I was conditioned…
Months passed and it didn’t, I finally let out a sigh of relief and let my guard down because now I knew there was no other shoe. Eight months later, my boyfriend was still just as dreamy as he was on the first day and our relationship was almost perfect, as perfect as it can get. So imagine my surprise when I woke up one morning to find out I was dumped via text. All alone in my room, far away from friends and family and home, in a quarantine and lockdown ridden world — I woke up to a WhatsApp text.
“I know this would come as a surprise but we need to break up. I’ve been really low and I cannot handle anything but me at this point. It’s definitely not you…” with no inclination whatsoever, of an actual, real reason that I could believe.
If hurting someone we promised to love is the only option left, the least we can do is let them down slowly.
As I read his text, one word after another, I felt my heart sink. Physically. It was not just an expression anymore. I felt the numbness take over as my fingers struggled to type. My eyes were blurred with tears that wouldn’t stop falling for days to come. The pain wasn’t in my head anymore, it had taken root at the centre of my chest. It sat there like a knot pressing against my heart, making it impossible for me to breathe. I don’t even remember for how long I sat there staring at that message, not breathing.
Abandoned, with no hint or reason, I felt betrayed, disposable & unlovable. All Over Again. Despite knowing what I’d been through, despite the promise to never put me in that situation again, he did it. Only, so much worse.
My mind was never at rest. I kept wondering about the same things. Why and how? I started to feel like an obsessive ex-girlfriend — rereading text messages, looking for hints I may have missed. I was looking for anything that would help me put the pieces together. Like a crazy stalker, I’d track his activity across platforms to just know that he was still living and breathing.
I strongly believe that leaving someone you claimed to love, in a turbulent state of mind, is monstrousity that will never be forgiven or forgotten. The mind will keep trying to put two and two together until it gets an answer and no one deserves to go through the trauma of that.
Knowing Is Better Than Wondering, No Matter How Hard The Truth
Even though I initially played the strong woman who doesn’t give a damn card, it got out of my control pretty soon. He meant more than some idea of how a modern breakup should be. I reached out a couple of times. He made excuses and pushed me away, slowly but strategically. Somewhere along the way, I found out he was already involved elsewhere. So I kept asking him if there is someone else in the picture and he kept lying to my face. Like a shameless, selfish coward. His lies were a massive insult to injury.
“There is no right way or time to end a relationship. There is no good way to say goodbye. No matter how I do this you will still end up hurt.”
His words not mine, leaving people hurt is something I would never do.
From where I stood, it was chaos, but if you saw it from the outside, it seemed like a very well-orchestrated play on how to break up and look like the good guy who fell victim to a bad phase in his life. Walking away might’ve not come as easy to him as I make it sound but he never looked back, so who knows? He did not tell me anything so I can only assume (the worst). He cut me off and started seeing someone else openly within a few weeks.
Upon finding that out, my mind wasn’t whirring anymore. Knowing that truth brought so much mental peace that I started to live again, little by little. I wasn’t being driven crazy, wondering why. I had enough answers or assumptions needed to move on and get past it.
My head still finds some puzzles occasionally. Like, was it all for her? Did he know her before? Did he cheat? Did he not know her? If not, did he choose a few weeks of flirting with her over a life lived with me? Was I too much for him or too little? Was I too smart or too dumb? Did I love him too much or not enough? Were we not as good for him as we seemed to me?
I‘d probably never know the answers but they don’t matter that much anymore. In moments when the truth would’ve made a difference, I was denied the closure I deserved. It would’ve put my mind at ease had I heard him tell me what happened instead of finding it out on my own. Maybe it wouldn’t have been a ‘good’bye but it could’ve definitely been a better one.
Eventually, you have to accept that there is nothing you can do, to fix something you did not break.
I don’t think I’ve been the same since he left me. It was devastating because I had no idea that something like that could even happen. For weeks after the breakup, I was stuck in my room that was nothing but a shrine of my now ex-boyfriend. I lived in the room where I fell in love with him. I slept in the bed where he had confessed his love for me.
When I missed his face, I’d close my eyes and try to play the happiest memories of us. But that tightened the knot in my stomach even more. I couldn’t think of him without feeling a stabbing pain sear through my heart. I couldn’t think of the good memories anymore. I felt like I might never be able to. And since he was already baby-ing his new girl, it doesn’t make much sense to stay hung up like that, does it?
There’s something strangely comforting about your worst nightmares coming true. It’s partly the validation that your gut was right all along. And the assurance that the worst has happened. Naturally, whatever comes next, will be better. There can be no other way. Maybe, that is good enough reason to wait for what’s going to unfold.
I would be lying if I say I don’t miss what I had with him. I’m not sure if what I miss today is him or the memories I made with him, the void he filled. But if I get a do-over, I might still choose to go through all this. I know that’s odd but the love and joy that I felt during the relationship is something I wouldn’t want to miss out on. Maybe, I’m a sad romantic like that. And it’s okay.
As I sleep alone in my cold, empty bed I miss the safety and comfort of sleeping in the arms of a man that I loved and I wonder if he misses me too. If only, sometimes? Maybe parallel universes do exist, maybe in one of them we are still together? One where I still wake up with a ‘unicorns and sunshine’ smile and call him up to hear his ‘Baby, rainbows are shooting out of my *ss’. Where we still walk hand in hand when we go to Ikea and ogle at each other from every corner. Where we still do movie dates on videocalls and he often shows me how much his Peace Lily has grown since I had it delivered to his office on Valentine’s Day.
I hope there is at least one such parallel universe where he still says ‘I love you’ to me and means it. Where we still look at each other with love and would fight to death to keep that love alive. I hope because it would be a waste of love if this is all our story was.
He wasn’t just some man I once loved, he felt like home. He felt more like home than home ever did. This is one story I wish I hadn’t been writing because when I started writing this, I was not heartbroken — I was homeless. Homeless and not in the know. So much worse than it sounds. More than the breakup, the way it was done, broke me apart.
Maybe I loved him more than I had ever loved but following the brutal goodbye, I will never think of him. I won’t be able to think of the good things because they are seeped in the brutality of the end.
Even though I still wear the gold watch he gave me for my birthday, almost every day, as a constant reminder of how quickly time can change — now the clear skies will always burn my soul, no longer will I eat pasta on the rooftop in the candlelight, a trip to Ikea will always be painful in a bittersweet way and I will forever look at peace lilies with tears brimming in my eyes.
Do you see how one wrong goodbye ruined something so extraordinarily beautiful? I will always wish I had gotten an honest goodbye instead of the detrimental hoax that I was loved and cared for, till I wasn’t.
Lies can never cushion the blow. So, just rip off the band aid and let healing take it’s course. Everyone gets over everything, in the end. That’s the beauty of being human, we relearn how to live everytime we are broken.
The truth, no matter how hard, is liberating. We can deal with the mess of what we know. We fear love because people always choose brutality over graceful endings. So next time, you think you have to say goodbye, let it be harsh, let it hurt, let it bleed, let it be a wave of searing pain and everything else it is going to be. Because at the same time, it’ll be raw and honest, genuine and heartfelt. And I promise it’ll be better than the alternative. For everyone involved.
