My last breakup was… two? Three years ago? I honestly don’t remember. What I do remember is that I didn’t really feel much besides rage because he cheated. It’s hard to mourn someone when your primary emotion is, “I hope your pillow is boiling hot on both sides.” So if you had asked me what a real breakup felt like, I probably would’ve shrugged and said, “I don’t know.”
Turns out, I really didn’t. Because approximately fifteen hours ago, I broke up with my boyfriend. Well… ex-boyfriend, I guess. Sorry, I’m still getting used to the terminology.
The funny thing is, for the first few hours, I didn’t really feel anything. Not sadness, not relief, just… empty. Maybe that’s what happens when you’re the one who ends it. Maybe your brain temporarily goes into power-saving mode because if it processed everything all at once, you’d simply combust. There was a little bit of relief, though, because I kept telling myself I was doing the right thing. Allegedly. That’s what I wanted to believe, anyway.
For context, I’m unemployed, and I’m also one bureaucratic nightmare away from getting dropped from university. Somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that I didn’t want him to be associated with someone like me. I didn’t want people looking at him and thinking, “That’s the guy dating the unemployed, degree-less girl.” I didn’t want my life to become something he had to explain or defend. Maybe that’s insecurity. Maybe it’s self-sabotage. Maybe it’s love. Maybe it’s all three. I honestly don’t know anymore. All I knew was that I loved him enough that the thought of becoming something that weighed him down scared me more than the thought of losing him.
Most of our relationship happened on Discord. Every morning I’d wake up to a “good morning” message before I even got out of bed. We’d call almost every day, not because we always had something important to say, but because existing together was enough. Sometimes he’d be watching YouTube, sometimes playing something, and every now and then he’d randomly decide to fix a piece of furniture while I listened to him wage war against a screwdriver. We’d scroll Twitter together, sending each other increasingly unhinged tweets until one of us laughed so hard we start snorting like a pig. Looking back, there wasn’t anything particularly extraordinary about what we did. We just shared our lives. Quietly. Consistently. The kind of ordinary you never realize you’re going to miss until one day it disappears without asking.
Our last call was earlier today. People always say love isn’t enough, and I used to hate hearing that because it sounded like something people only said to make themselves feel better. But now I think I finally understand it. I still love him. I loved him through that entire call, I loved him while I was ending it, and I still love him now. There wasn’t some dramatic betrayal or explosive fight. If anything, I ended things because I cared too much. I didn’t want my circumstances to become his burden. Maybe years from now I’ll reread this and realize I was an absolute idiot. Maybe I’ll think it was the kindest thing I could’ve done. Right now, I genuinely can’t tell the difference.
What I can tell you is that heartbreak is the dumbest thing I’ve ever experienced. People always portray it as lying dramatically in bed, refusing to eat while sad music plays in the background. While it was partly true, I… was absolutely starving.
Like, “I could eat a literal elephant” starving.
Apparently heartbreak didn’t take away my appetite. It just unplugged whatever part of my brain is responsible for basic motor functions. I bought myself bakmie. I also bought wedang ronde. Then, because every wire in my brain had apparently melted, I somehow poured the wedang ronde broth into my bakmie and the bakmie broth into the wedang ronde. I didn’t even notice until I took a bite. My noodles tasted like jamu. My wedang ronde tasted vaguely like chicken broth. I had accidentally invented a dish that I genuinely hope nobody ever recreates. To make matters worse, everything was still boiling hot, so while I was trying to process why my bakmie suddenly tasted like herbal medicine, it also burned my tongue and my throat. It was objectively one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done.
And then I cried. Not because my food tasted terrible. Not because I’d somehow committed a culinary crime against Indonesia. But because my first instinct was to tell him. I wanted to take a picture and send it to him with, “You are NOT going to believe what I just did.” I wanted him to laugh. I wanted him to call me an idiot. I wanted him to say, “How did you even manage to do that?” Instead, I just sat there eating my cursed bakmie by myself, realizing I had nobody to tell anymore. That’s the part nobody warns you about. Heartbreak isn’t always about missing the big things. It’s about missing your audience. It’s realizing the person who used to receive every dumb thought that crossed your mind isn’t there anymore. The funny tweet. The weird bug in your game. The random thing you saw at the grocery store. The fact that you accidentally made bakmie taste like wedang ronde. None of those things matter to the rest of the world, but they mattered because they mattered to the two of you.
Since then, I’ve discovered my emotions operate on what I can only assume is a thirty-minute rotation schedule. I’ll cry until I can’t breathe, then suddenly feel completely okay, then immediately feel guilty for feeling okay, then remember I won’t wake up to a good morning text tomorrow and start crying all over again. Then I get hungry. Then I cry because I’m hungry. Then I accidentally create another culinary disaster because my brain has apparently clocked out for the day. Then I cry because I can’t tell him about that, either. At this point I genuinely think I could text him, “Hey, I’m breathing.” Not because breathing is particularly exciting, but because somewhere along the way he became the person I wanted to tell everything to. Even when nothing happened. Especially when nothing happened.
Before this, I thought emptiness meant exactly what the word promised. Nothing. No color, no weight, no sound. Just absence. But I don’t think that’s true anymore. I think emptiness is strangely colorful. It’s the color of Discord notifications that never arrive. It’s the color of a “good morning” text that doesn’t light up your phone anymore. It’s funny tweets that still make you laugh before you remember you don’t have anyone to send them to. It’s bakmie that somehow tastes like wedang ronde because your brain is too fried to function, and then crying, not because your food is terrible, but because your first instinct is still to tell the person who isn’t there anymore. It’s reaching for your phone dozens of times a day before your brain quietly catches up with reality.
None of those moments are big enough to be remembered on their own, but together they fill every corner of your day. Maybe that’s why heartbreak doesn’t feel black. It isn’t empty in the way I imagined emptiness would be. It’s full of little colors that used to belong to someone else. Maybe that’s what grief really is… not the absence of a person, but the presence of every place they used to occupy.
I guess even emptiness has color.
