05/08/2026
Sadly, you have to learn how to stop talking to someone. You will cry. Your chest will ache. You will feel like you're losing your mind. But you will not die.
She knows because she almost didn't believe that last part.
There was a moment. A real one. Where she was so deep in the withdrawal of someone's absence that her body couldn't tell the difference between heartbreak and a medical emergency. Her chest physically hurt. Not metaphorically. Not poetically. She felt it pressing against her ribs like something inside her was collapsing and nobody could see it because the damage was too internal to diagnose from the outside.
And she reached for her phone. Not once. A hundred times. Typed his name. Hovered over the call button. Wrote messages she never sent. Deleted messages she should've never written. Stared at a screen that used to light up with his name and now just sat there... dark and silent and heavier than anything that small should ever feel.
Stopping felt like dying. She needs people to understand that.
Not the casual "I miss them" kind. The kind where her body forgot how to eat because the appetite left with him. Where her brain couldn't hold a thought for longer than thirty seconds before it circled back to his voice or his laugh or the last thing he said that she keeps turning over in her mind trying to find a version that doesn't end with silence.
It's withdrawal. Literal, chemical, biological withdrawal from a person her nervous system attached to the way it attaches to survival. He became her baseline. Her normal. The thing her body expected every morning. And removing that expectation didn't just make her sad. It made her sick.
And nobody talks about the physical part. The nausea. The insomnia. The way her hands shook for the first three days like her body was searching for something it couldn't find. The way exhaustion hit her at 2PM because grief takes more energy than any job she's ever worked.
She went nearly crazy. Not an exaggeration. Not for drama. She genuinely questioned her own stability. Questioned whether she could make it through a week without hearing his voice. Questioned if the ache in her chest would ever soften or if this was just how she existed now. A woman walking around with a wound that nobody can see and everybody expects her to function through.
But she didn't die.
She woke up the next morning. And the one after that. And the one after that. Each one slightly less unbearable than the last. Not easier. Just survivable. The difference between drowning and treading water. Between falling and slowing down.
She didn't text him. Some days that was her only accomplishment. Just making it to midnight without reaching out. Just proving to herself that the urge to hear from him is not the same as the need to. That her body is lying to her when it says she can't survive this. That the ache will ease. Slowly. Unkindly. Without permission. But it will ease.
She's learning to live without someone she thought she couldn't live without. And the learning is ugly. It's quiet breakdowns in parking lots. It's driving past places they used to go and gripping the steering wheel so tight her knuckles turn white. It's hearing a song and pulling over because her body wasn't prepared for the memory it unlocked.
But she's alive. Still here. Still breathing. Still showing up to a life that doesn't include him anymore even though every cell in her body keeps whispering his name like a habit it hasn't unlearned yet.
She will unlearn him. Not today. Not completely. But eventually the space he filled will become a space she fills with something that doesn't require losing herself to hold onto.
It feels like dying. But it isn't. And the woman who survives this... the one standing on the other side of the silence with eyes that are tired but clear... she's going to look back one day and realize that stopping didn't kill her.
It saved her.