I stopped noticing the small things disappearing, my routines, my preferences, the quiet ways I carved out space for myself.It wasn’t that he asked me to give them up; I simply… handed them over, piece by piece, not because I had to, but because I didn’t know how not to.

A decade went by like that.

Ten years passed, and there wasn’t a clear line where I ended and he began, just this blur I thought was love. Everything I did started with a ‘we’; I forgot there used to be a ‘me.’ I knew his moods better than my own. I could even tell what kind of day it would be by the way he closed the silverware drawer. If it slammed, I’d tread more lightly. If it slid gently, I’d exhale. I knew when to be quiet, when to make him laugh, and when to give him space.

When he left, it wasn’t dramatic at all. It was merely… quiet. It felt as if the world had gone mute. I spent three days in bed, neither crying nor sleeping, just remaining still. I recall wondering, ‘What now?’

It felt as if someone had erased the outline of my life.

For weeks, I wandered through my apartment like a guest in someone else’s space. I didn’t know what kind of day I wanted to experience because, for so long, my days were merely reactions to his. I had all this time and no idea what to do with it. It was as if I’d been waiting for permission to exist. I looked around my apartment and saw pieces of him everywhere, yet almost nothing that felt like me. I kept preparing the meals he liked, without even thinking about it. I realized I didn’t even know what my comfort food was. That was the most disorienting part, realizing how completely I’d lost track of myself.

Not because I didn’t care about myself, but because I had trained myself to care more about him. His needs. His comfort. His dreams.

It wasn’t anger I felt; it was grief. But not just for the relationship, also for the version of myself I never got to know thoroughly.

People kept telling me I was free now. That I could do anything, be anyone. But I didn’t feel free. Instead, I felt like a stranger in my own skin. I wasn’t mourning the love. I was mourning the years I hadn’t built a life of my own. The freedom they spoke of didn’t feel like a clean slate. It felt like work, emotional, awkward, necessary work.

But beneath it all was this quiet knowing: for the first time, I was building something that belonged to me. So I began where I was, with mornings that were mine. A purposeless walk. A playlist that didn’t remind me of anyone. Little things, but they mattered. I wasn’t just piecing myself back together; I was meeting myself for the very first time. And even though I didn’t have everything figured out, I finally had myself. Somehow, that felt more like freedom than anything I’d ever known.