Ep 2

I was broken.

Not the kind of broken people notice.

Not the kind that leaves visible cracks for the world to point at and say, there, that’s where it hurts. Mine was quieter than that. Softer. The kind of breaking that happens behind closed doors, under dim lights, in rooms that learn your silence better than your voice.

I became very good at hiding.

I hid in routine. I hid in excuses. I hid behind tired smiles and practiced laughter and casual replies that sounded convincing enough for people to stop asking questions.

“I’m fine.”

It became my most polished lie.

And people believed me because I made it easy for them to.

I still woke up every morning. I still got dressed. I still showed up where I was supposed to. I still smiled when someone cracked a joke. I still nodded during conversations, still replied to messages, still existed in all the ways people could see.

But none of it was real.

My smile never reached my eyes.

It only curved across my lips because that’s what was expected. Because people are more comfortable with a version of grief they don’t have to witness.

My laughter was even worse.

It sounded right. It came at the right moments. It was timed perfectly, almost beautifully. But it never came from my heart. It rose to the surface and died there, hollow before it even escaped me.

Some days, I would hear myself laugh and feel nothing at all, as if the sound belonged to someone standing beside me instead of someone living inside my skin.

That scared me more than the pain ever did.

Because pain, at least, is proof that something inside you is still alive.

This—

this numb pretending, this quiet performance of being okay—

felt like disappearing slowly while everyone watched and called it healing.

I gave up on everything I used to love.

The little things went first.

Music stopped sounding like comfort. It became noise filling empty spaces I was too afraid to sit in. I stopped making playlists for rainy evenings. I stopped humming absentmindedly while doing chores. The songs that once felt like home suddenly sounded like places I no longer belonged.

Then came the bigger things.

Books sat unopened beside my bed, gathering dust like abandoned promises. The stories I once escaped into now felt exhausting, as if even fictional happiness had become too heavy for me to carry.

I stopped writing.

That hurt the most.

Because writing had always been where I went when the world became too loud. It had always been the one place where I could pour myself out and feel lighter afterward. But after him—after everything—I couldn’t bring myself to touch words anymore.

What was the point of writing about feelings I no longer understood?

What was the point of poetry when all I felt was absence?

So I stopped.

I let my favorite pieces of myself slip away one by one, not because I wanted to, but because holding onto them felt harder than losing them.

People noticed, of course.

But only in the shallow ways people notice things.

“You’ve been quiet lately.”

“You should go out more.”

“You need a distraction.”

As if grief was a room I could simply walk out of.

As if sadness was a choice I was making out of stubbornness.

I would nod. Smile. Promise I’d try.

And then I’d come home, shut the door, and let the mask fall off my face like dead weight.

Night was always the hardest.

Daytime gave me things to do, people to answer, places to be. The sunlight demanded movement. It forced me to keep pretending.

But the night—

the night never asked me to perform.

The night knew.

The moment darkness covered the sky and the world grew quiet, everything I had spent the day holding back would rush toward me all at once.

That’s when I cried.

Not delicately. Not beautifully.

I cried like someone trying to empty an ocean from inside her chest.

I cried until my ribs hurt. Until breathing felt sharp. Until my throat burned from swallowing sobs I didn’t want the walls to hear.

I cried into my pillow because it was the only thing that stayed.

The only witness that never got tired of me.

That pillow knows more about my sadness than any person ever will.

It knows how many nights I buried my face into it just to keep my own pain from sounding too loud.

It knows the taste of my tears so well that sometimes I think it could tell my story better than I ever could.

It knows how many times I whispered his name into the dark, not because I thought he would hear me, but because I didn’t know what else to do with all the love I still had left.

It knows how many nights I begged the silence to make me forget.

How many mornings I woke up exhausted, not because I hadn’t slept, but because grief had followed me even into my dreams.

That’s what breaking looked like for me.

Not one dramatic collapse.

Just a thousand quiet surrenders.

A thousand moments of pretending in daylight and unraveling in the dark.

A thousand pieces of myself slipping through my fingers while the world kept moving like nothing had changed.

And maybe that’s the cruelest part.

How life keeps asking you to go on

even when you no longer remember

what it ever felt like

to be whole.