351. you’ll be all right

She said, “you’ll be all right.”

But what she really meant was that she needed to believe I would survive without her, so she could leave.

I nodded as though her reassurance hadn't punched a void straight through me.

What she couldn’t understand is that something inside me didn’t just break. It vanished. And what vanished wasn’t just her. It was the life that had already started forming around us.

The truth is, I don’t want to be all right. I want the place inside myself that finally stopped bracing. I want the version of me that existed when belonging felt possible.

I move through the world imitating someone unbroken. I answer emails. I stand in line. I nod at strangers. But inside, everything is screaming.

There is a constant pressure in my chest, like something is trying to claw its way out. I can’t breathe deeply anymore. My body doesn’t remember how. The ache is so constant it feels like a second heartbeat.

I don’t miss her the way you miss a person. I miss her the way you miss oxygen. Like something essential was removed and now every breath is shallow, conscious, and incomplete.

I don’t know where to put myself. Every place feels wrong. Every room feels temporary. I sit down and immediately want to stand back up because nothing feels like it belongs to me anymore.

I didn’t lose a person. I lost the gravity her love provided, and now everything in me drifts, panicked, reaching for something that no longer pulls back.

My body keeps asking the same question my mind can’t answer: where is home?

This pain doesn’t come in waves that crash and recede. It just an endless swell that keeps building. Each moment adds more weight, more pressure, with no release. Just more and more and more.

I hold it together until I don’t. There are moments when my body collapses into the grief without warning. In the car. In the shower. Standing still with nowhere to go. I don’t plan it. It just happens.

There’s a hollowness underneath all of it. Not loud. Not sharp. Just empty. Like something fundamental was removed and nothing was put in its place.

I gave everything I had. I didn’t hide. I didn’t blame. I didn’t demand. I spoke the truth with my whole soul.  And the silence that followed didn’t just hurt. It erased.

I hate that the silence makes me doubt my own memory. Like the safest place I’ve ever known was never real enough to deserve a “goodbye.”

Silence is not neutral. Silence is a message your nervous system interprets as abandonment. It tells you that your pain has nowhere to land, nowhere it can be explained enough to rest.

I walk around carrying something unbearable, while everyone else keeps living like breathing is automatic. Like home is still a place you can return to.

I am not all right. I am not healing. I am just surviving minute to minute inside a body that no longer feels safe to inhabit.

This is not a breakup. This is the loss of the only place I ever truly felt safe.

And I don’t know how to build a life when the thing that made it finally feel livable is gone.