2014 was a year of uncertainty. I still had two years left before graduating, and watching him, already graduated and in a good job, only deepened my sense of confusion.
How could I become someone worthy of standing beside him? Around him, I often felt a little insecure. He was curious and knowledgeable, with an impressive grasp of history, geography, and politics. Even though he was set on a career in business rather than academia, his depth of understanding was undeniable. Books, films, music—he didn’t just consume them; he delved into them. Being with someone like him was a source of pride, but I couldn’t stop myself from comparing, especially when my confidence wavered.
As I’ve mentioned before, he never once made me feel inadequate. He rarely gave compliments, but he never implied I wasn’t enough. I always believed in his feelings for me, completely and unwaveringly—no matter where he was, how long we were apart, or what our friends and family said.
But I wanted to be apart. I wanted to know what life would feel like without him. Uncertainty gives people a strange kind of courage, though it’s often the courage of the foolish. He couldn’t accept it, so he proposed delaying our breakup until our 50-month anniversary. We’d take one last trip together, then part ways. People often choose auspicious dates for weddings—this was the first time I’d heard of choosing a date for a breakup.
The night before that day, I wrote him a letter. I poured out all my confusion and my gratitude. I can’t remember how many pages it was, only that I cried through every word. We’d never fought, and our days together had been happy ones. The hardest part was deciding which memories to take with me, and which to leave behind.
It felt like a scene from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, hiding in memories that were slipping away. One line from the film, the one I chose as my profile picture, pierced me the most:
"Please let me keep this memory, just this one."
What broke my heart even more was when he told me that he’d stayed up all night backing up photos from Facebook, afraid I might delete them. I think we cried the whole night. Every moment, I regretted my decision, yet some force within me insisted I had to leave him.
We said goodbye on a subway platform. I was still crying, but he was calm—not smiling, not crying. I knew his heart must have shattered. I also knew the line he’d once told me, “I don’t smile when I’m happy,” wasn’t true.
Later, I found a gift from him on my doorstep. Later still, I went to see the film Murmur of the Hearts and found him sitting next to me. And for a time, we messaged each other every day, even met for meals. But in the moment we might have reconnected, we drifted apart again.
It was only after he left that I truly began exploring films and music. Some of the films he’d recommended, I’d put off watching until I realised we’d never watch them together again. Then I carefully worked through them, one by one, as if sharing them in my mind could preserve a part of him. I carried the songs he loved too, seeking out similar ones. Whenever I saw him share a song on Facebook and realised I was listening to the same one, it still made me smile.
In Murmur of the Hearts, Sylvia Chang asks, “Is there someone you think you’ve forgotten, but who’s shaped your entire life?” My answer was sitting right next to me. But I held back my tears, because I knew he wouldn’t offer me a tissue anymore.
Perhaps his story won’t appear again in the chapters that follow, but his shadow will remain—woven into my life, my growth, my words, and my preferences.
Here’s a song about stations and goodbyes: Låpsley’s Station.
"I could walk you back to the station
Talk about our own frustrations."
