18. What Really Happened in 2025 #3
My fingers tightened.
“I just—I was frustrated,” I added, stumbling heavily over my words. “Not at you… I mean—no, not like that. I wanted to be there for you, and I didn’t know how, and it came out wrong and—”
I stopped, breath uneven.
He was still looking at me.
Still unreadable… or maybe not unreadable. Because if I looked closely enough, I saw it, something in his face.
In the slight tension of his jaw.
In the way his eyes didn’t soften.
It felt like… discomfort. Even disgust… at my presence.
It seemed me being there didn’t sit right with him. Like he was tolerating me.
My chest tightened, but I kept going anyway.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” I said, softer now. “I know you’ve been through things before, and I shouldn’t have—” I paused, choosing my words carefully, because I was afraid that one wrong thing would break everything.
“But you know,” I added, gently. “I, too, have been hurt… by you. Before. And—I—I forgave you for it. I stayed.”
The silence that followed felt sharper than anything said.
“I’m not saying that to blame you,” I quickly added, panic creeping in. “I just—I thought maybe we could—work through what I did. Together. Like we always do.”
Nothing.
Victor leaned back slightly, his expression tightening in a way that made something inside my stomach drop.
Then he said it.
“I don’t know.”
My breath caught.
“I need time.”
That was it.
Simple.
Final in a way that didn’t sound final—but felt like it was.
Something in my chest cracked: hurt and annoyance.
But I just nodded, even if it didn’t feel like an agreement.
“Okay,” I said, though my voice barely held.
I stayed there for a second longer than I should have. Waiting. For something. For him to soften. To reach out. To say, “Wait. I love you still. Let’s work it out.”
He didn’t.
So I stood up.
Slowly.
Like if I moved too fast, it would make it real.
“I’ll… just… go…” I said.
He didn’t stop me. He didn’t say anything at all.
And somehow, that hurt more than if he had.
And when I found myself outside of his apartment building, the sinking feeling started to seep deep within my chest.
I started walking, but I didn’t know where I was going.
My vision blurred halfway down the street, my limbs numb, my sweat cold.
And then the tears came, because I kept replaying it in my mind: his face, his voice, the distance in the space between us, and the way he didn’t try to stop me from leaving.
For the first time since it all began, it didn’t feel like something we could fix.
It felt like something I had already lost.
And I was just now catching up to it.
The next week became something I survived hour by hour.
Not day by day. Not morning to night. But hour by hour.
Because grief didn’t arrive all at once. It came in waves so random and cruel that I never learned how to prepare for them.
Sometimes I’d be brushing my teeth, and suddenly I’d remember the way Victor used to stand behind me at the sink, half-asleep, one hand resting on my waist like I belonged to him.
And just like that, my chest would cave in again.
Sometimes I’d hear a laugh in public that sounded almost like his, and my entire body would react before my mind could catch up.
Sometimes I’d wake up forgetting for three full seconds that we had fallen apart. And those were always the worst moments. Because for three seconds, I believed I still had him.
Then reality returned all over again. And God, it was unbearable.
I cried every day.
The kind where tears slipped out while commuting home because a song came on shuffle.
The kind where I’d stare at the ceiling at four in the morning, exhausted but unable to sleep because my mind kept playing fantasies of us doing okay again.
The kind where I’d suddenly break down while folding laundry because I remembered he once said he liked me in blue.
It was humiliating how much pain a person could hold for someone who was no longer reaching back. And the worst part about this situationship heartbreak wasn’t even the sadness.
It was the waiting.
The constant, desperate waiting.
Waiting for your phone to light up.
Waiting for them to realize they miss you too.
Waiting for them to come back softer. Kinder. Ready.
You built entire futures inside tiny silences.
Every notification became hope.
Every silence became grief all over again.
And somehow even, after everything, I still loved him.
That was the part nobody talked about enough.
How love didn’t disappear just because someone hurt you. How your heart could understand something was breaking you and still crawl toward it anyway.
But also how cruel silence could be. How someone you loved could hold themselves back from you on purpose—offering distance, withholding warmth, making you sit alone in the punishment of that one mistake that, deep down, felt forgivable.
Still, I kept thinking maybe if I gave him enough time, he’d come back. Maybe he just needed space. Maybe love like ours wouldn’t end this way.
But days kept passing.
And Victor never came around.
Until one evening, I realized I couldn’t keep living suspended between hope and rejection.
The battle between the love I had for him and the self-respect I had for myself became unbearably exhausting.
Not just physically, but soul-deep.
Tiredness and I became one—the kind that came from loving someone with your entire body while slowly realizing they were already letting go of you.
So I went to his apartment building… again, without letting him know.
The evening air felt heavy, humid enough to cling to my skin. Cars moved past me in slow streams of light while I stood outside the entrance, staring at the glass doors like they held answer to my entire life.
My hands trembled as I typed:
I’m outside.
The message sent immediately.
And then I waited.
Every second stretched.
Part of me hoped he wouldn’t come down because maybe that meant there was still something left to save. And another part prayed he would because I couldn’t survive uncertainty anymore.
Then finally, the doors opened.
Victor stepped out in a simple white V-neck t-shirt.
And my heart broke a little even nobody spoke, because he still looked guarded. Distant.
He had already built walls I no longer could climb.
He stopped a few feet away from me.
Neither of us moved closer.
I swallowed hard.
“Have you decided?” I asked, a little demand in my tone.
Victor exhaled quietly, glancing away for half a second before looking back at me.
“No,” he said carefully. “I still have—”
But I cut in. “At this point, we’re just playing the long goodbye.”
Silence.
I looked at him fully then, forcing myself to ask the question I had been terrified of since this started.
“So let me ask you directly,” I said, my voice soft but certain. “We’re never going back to the way we were before… are we?”
The pause that followed nearly destroyed me.
Because I watched it happen in real time—the hesitation, the guilt, the truth settling into his face before he even said it.
Then quietly—almost gently—Victor replied, “I’m sorry. Not anymore.”
Not anymore.
Two words.
How cruel.
That was all it took to end an entire future I had built inside my head.
I nodded once. Bitterly. Not because I was okay nor I accepted it, but because my body didn’t know what else to do while my heart was breaking open inside my chest.
For a second, I just stood there looking at him.
The person I loved the most in the world.
The person I would’ve stayed for.
The person I kept hoping would choose me back.
And he didn’t.
Tears burned behind my eyes, but I forced myself to breathe through it.
Then slowly—before I could change my mind—I stepped back.
Victor didn’t stop me… didn’t reach for me.
So this time, I walked away with what dignity that was left in me.
After that night, something inside me shut down.
It felt as though all the lights in a building went out at once.
At first, I told myself I was just exhausted. That anyone could get over something like that quickly. But the days that followed felt less like recovery and more like disappearance.
The sadness stayed.
So did the longing.
The bitterness.
The anger.
And worst of all, the regret.
They all lived inside me at once, fighting for space beneath my ribs until I could barely hear my own thoughts anymore.
And the strangest part was how invisible heartbreak could look from the outside, because the world kept moving.
People still posted brunch photos. Traffic still clogged the streets. My coworkers still laughed during shifts. The city still lit up at night like nothing inside me had collapsed.
Meanwhile, I was barely holding myself together.
So, I stopped replying to people properly.
At first, my friends noticed.
Andi would send messages like, ‘Hey, gay. You still alive?’
Honey would send fashion TikToks and voice notes full of gossip.
Andre asked if I wanted to grab drinks because he needed some of my “gay therapy.”
Mel checked in quietly, like she always did.
I answered all of them the same way.
I’m busy.
Work’s been crazy!
I’m okay.
Lies.
Because how was I supposed to admit that I was falling apart over someone I technically never had?
A situationship.
Even the word sounded small compared to the grief sitting inside me.
So I kept it to myself.
Besides, my friends never really knew Victor.
They just knew I was dating someone. That was it.
They never saw how deeply he got into me—how quickly he became part of my routines, my future, my sense of safety.
And that was what made it worse.
Because heartbreak without witness made you question your own pain.
So instead of talking about it, I disappeared into it.
I stopped going out, answering calls, and posting online.
Even eating started feeling optional.
Sleep became strange too.
Some nights I slept too much because being unconscious felt easier than being awake. Other nights I barely slept at all because my mind kept replaying him like a punishment.
And work? God! It became impossible.
Calls would come in through my headset and I’d stare at the screen, frozen, unable to press accept.
My KPIs dropped so badly that eventually, I stopped checking them altogether.