Chapter 1 Safe place, untill he wasn't

With him, I learned how to breathe. Not just in the way lungs rise and fall, but the kind of breathing that lets your soul rest. I let my guard down because he made safety feel simple. But even soft hands can let go. And when he did, I didn't fall-I unraveled. Quietly. Completely. Like I never knew what solid ground was to begin with.

Days blurred into each other like raindrops on glass-quiet, constant, and impossible to separate. I kept moving, but it wasn't living. It was surviving. The bed felt too big. The world felt too loud. And everywhere I went, I kept looking for a face that wasn't coming back.

His name was Jordan. My first love. The kind that makes your chest ache and your smile bloom at the same time. We met in the oddest of ways-a comment on a mutual friend's post, a private message, a late-night conversation that stretched into morning. And then it kept going.

He was continents away, but somehow closer than most people who sat right next to me. It was a long-distance thing, and anyone who's ever been in one knows-you don't just fall in love. You fight for it. You make sacrifices, give up sleep, rearrange your life for time zones that rarely align.

Our mornings were mismatched. When I woke up, he was halfway through his day. When I was just settling in for dinner, he was already yawning, fighting to stay awake just to hear my voice. And he always stayed awake. Always. We had a ritual-video calls with sleepy eyes, screenshots of what we were eating, random voice notes saying, "I miss you," or, "Guess what happened today."

There were nights I fell asleep with my phone on my pillow, his face the last thing I saw. And mornings I woke to a message from him saying, "You looked so peaceful when you dozed off. I watched for a while."

We sent videos-him singing to me in his car, me dancing in my room to our song. He said he loved how I looked when I didn't know I was being watched, how my smile had a kind of light that cameras couldn't hide.

He flirted like a poet. "You ruin me," he once texted, after I sent him a photo in my favorite dress. "In the best possible way."

We had a future mapped out in detail. The city we'd live in. The names of our kids. What our wedding colors would be. We joked about how we'd argue over who gets the last slice of pizza or who has to do laundry. And beneath the laughter, it all felt real. Tangible. Like a thread between us that nothing could snap.

I got close to his family. His sister called me "sis." His mom messaged me with recipes, asking if I'd ever try them with him one day. His dad joked that I'd better be ready for family game nights. I didn't feel like a guest. I felt like I already belonged.

He once told me, "When I picture my life ten years from now, you're there. Always there. Every version of the future I want has you in it."

I believed him. Every word.

There were hard days, of course. Days when I cried because the distance felt unbearable. Days when he missed a call or I fell asleep waiting. But we always found our way back to each other. The kind of love that folds you into itself, makes you feel like you've finally found the thing that was missing.

But somewhere in the middle of all that love, something cracked. It happened quietly. A shift I didn't notice until the weight of it made breathing harder again.

He cheated. Once. That's what he said. Just once.

The night he told me, I thought I misheard him. I stared at the screen, blinking like it would change the words. He was crying. I was frozen.

"It didn't mean anything," he kept repeating. "It didn't mean anything."

But the truth is, it meant everything. Because we built this thing on trust. On sacrifice. On waiting. And all the sleepless nights, all the longing, all the love-it crashed with seven words: I was with someone else last weekend.

He said he regretted it instantly. That it was a mistake. That he missed me so much, it made him stupid. And I believed him. Not because I was naive, but because I knew the man he had been to me. The man who stayed up till 4 a.m. to hear about my bad day. The man who sent me flowers even though I told him not to spend money. The man who once wrote me a letter by hand and mailed it across the world.

We tried. For a while. I tried to forget. He tried to make up for it. But something had shifted. The thread had frayed.

I couldn't look at him the same way. I couldn't laugh without wondering who made him laugh that weekend. I couldn't hear "our song" without thinking whose body he was holding while it played.

We ended with a whisper, not a bang. A mutual knowing. A slow goodbye stretched over calls that grew shorter, texts that felt hollow, and silence that started to feel like mercy.

And now, he's gone. Not just from my life, but from the version of me who once believed love alone was enough.

Some days, I miss him like a memory I want to relive. Other days, I miss who I was before I ever knew what betrayal felt like.

But most days, I just try to breathe again. The kind of breathing that lets your soul rest. And maybe, one day, I will.

Maybe healing isn't about forgetting. Maybe it's about forgiving the version of yourself that didn't see it coming. Maybe it's about learning how to hold your own heart with the same softness you once gave away.

I still dream about him sometimes. Not the night he told me, not the pain-but the laughter. The way his face lit up when I answered a call. The way he whispered my name like a prayer when he was tired. In those dreams, we're still us. Untouched by the world.

And when I wake up, there's silence. A heavy kind. But now, I'm learning to sit with it. Not fear it.

Because even silence can be sacred. Even silence can be healing.