When broken bodies are washed ashore, who am I to ask for more?
I had spent most of my life learning how love could hurt, until you came along and taught me how beautiful it could be.
I grew up watching love become something painful. Something people endured rather than enjoyed, something that slowly turned tenderness into resentment. So when you came into my life and loved me differently, I didn’t know what to do with it at first. I wasn’t used to love that felt gentle. I wasn’t used to feeling safe with someone. And perhaps that was why I held onto you so tightly when I finally found it.
You made me believe that love could be a place to rest. You made me believe that someone as messy and broken as me could still be loved without having to become someone else first. You taught me the kindest kind of love I’ve ever known.
For the first time, I stopped wondering whether I was too much to be chosen. With you, I felt like I could simply exist and still be worthy of staying for.
And somewhere along the way, I started building my entire world around you.
I put all my faith in us and now I don’t know what to pray for.
Because when you left, it wasn’t only you that disappeared. Somehow, the person I was before I met you disappeared with you too. I had spent so much of myself loving you, so much of my life learning your habits, remembering your little things, imagining what our future would look like, that I forgot there was supposed to be a life that belonged only to me.
I loved you more than I knew how to love myself.
And now I am paying for it.
Your leaving has made everything feel unfamiliar. My days still look the same from the outside. I wake up, go to class, talk to people, laugh when something is funny, come home, and pretend that I am slowly getting used to this new life. But there is something missing underneath all of it. Something I cannot name without admitting that perhaps I am not only grieving you.
I am grieving me, too.
When you left, I didn’t just lose you. I lost myself, too.
Sometimes I catch myself wondering what I liked before you. What I used to look forward to. Who I was before your name became the first person I wanted to tell everything to. I try to reach for that version of myself, but she feels impossibly far away now, like someone I once knew but can no longer remember how to become.
And then there are the things you left behind.
The dried flowers you gave me, still carefully arranged on my table. The old chocolate wrapper you gave me on our first Valentine’s Day. The little radio keychain still tucked away in my drawer, carrying the sound of your gentle voice. The tote bag we painted together. The colorful balloon lamp you gave me two years ago. And your jacket, which I still wear sometimes, just to feel a little bit of the warmth I once found in you.
I am still trying to learn how to live with the silence you left behind. Still trying to understand how someone can be so deeply woven into your everyday life and then suddenly become someone you are supposed to live as though you never knew.
I still think of you when something good happens. Also the bad ones.
I still want to tell you things.
I still sometimes reach for my phone before remembering that there is no reason to anymore.
And every time I remember, it feels like losing you all over again.
People tell you that time makes things easier, but I don’t know if I believe that yet. Maybe time does not make you miss someone less. Maybe time won’t heal anything. Maybe it only teaches you how to hide the missing better.
Because I still miss you in the quietest moments:
When I’m walking home,
When a familiar song comes on,
When I smoke alone at night,
When I see something you would have laughed at,
When I pass a street we once walked together,
You are still there, somehow, in all the ordinary places I thought I would eventually reclaim for myself.
I don’t want to erase you. I don’t think I ever could. You were too deeply woven into a version of my life that once felt like everything. I don’t want to pretend that loving you was a mistake just because it ended painfully. It wasn’t. You were once my greatest love, and I was once lucky enough to be yours. That part of our story deserves to remain beautiful, even if the ending wasn’t.
Maybe one day, I’ll be able to think of you without wishing you were still here.
Maybe one day, the dried flowers will just be dried flowers. The chocolate wrapper will become nothing more than an old piece of paper. The tote bag and the keychain will simply be something I carry around. And the streets we once walked together will become mine again.
But until that day comes, I’ll let the memories exist. And even when it finally does, you’ll still be a part of me that I’ll carry with me along the way.
You’re gonna live forever in me — through the dried flowers sitting quietly in the corner of my table, through every single cigarette I smoke, through the old chocolate wrapper I never had the heart to throw away, through the radio keychain tucked inside my box, through your jackets that I wear to feel your warmth, through the old things I still cannot bring myself to throw away. Through certain songs, certain smells, certain streets, certain hours of the night.
And maybe, in all these little remnants of you, I’ll spend a long time trying to find the parts of me I lost when you left.
Ditulis oleh Alya Fitri Ramadhani
Diedit oleh Diandra Wafiyatunnisa
Didesain oleh Malika Afza Fathiya Rizal
