The Last Message
I don't know exactly when a relationship turns into a habit.
Maybe it isn't when the conversations start to dwindle. Nor is it when we stop looking for reasons to see each other. Maybe the relationship had changed long before I realized it—when opening Aruna's messages no longer made my heart race, but instead made me calculate how long I had to wait before replying.
Two minutes was too fast.
Fifteen minutes might still look normal.
An hour would make her wonder.
I had even written replies, deleted them, then placed my phone beneath my pillow as if that could make the thing stop waiting for me.
That night, my phone lay on the bedroom floor. Its screen lit up for a moment, then went dark. The notification light reflected off the table leg and disappeared before it could illuminate anything.
I was sitting on the edge of the bed, still wearing the clothes I'd put on that afternoon. Outside, motorcycles passed in front of the house now and then. The fan kept turning with its soft, repetitive hum. Everything kept moving as usual, except me.
Aruna's message had been waiting for two days.
I knew because I had caught a glimpse of it in the notification. I didn't open it. I didn't answer. Not because I wanted to punish her, nor because I wanted to make her anxious. I simply didn't know what to say.
“I'm tired” sounded like an excuse.
“I'm dealing with some problems” felt too broad.
“I don't want to talk to anyone” was the most honest sentence, but honesty often sounds cruelest when sent through a screen.
On the third day, I finally opened the conversation.
Aruna's last message was only one sentence.
If you don't reply to this chat, then we're breaking up.
I read it over and over. Not because I didn't understand, but because I hoped the sentence would change if I read it long enough. The letters stayed the same. There was no further explanation. No question. No door I could use to reenter the conversation.
My thumb hovered over the keyboard.
I could explain everything. About how my mind was never truly quiet. About waking up with a heavy feeling that had no name. About how opening even a single app sometimes felt like facing the whole world. I could ask for time. I could apologize.
But that night, I didn't have the energy to save a relationship that had lived more often inside a screen than between the two of us from the very beginning.
So I typed:
Yeah.
One word.
There were no dramatic tears. No sound of anything breaking. I just stared at the message until my eyes hurt, then turned off my phone.
It was strange. All this time, I had been afraid of losing Aruna. But when the relationship truly ended, what I felt wasn't the loss of a person. What I felt was an empty space that had finally stopped pretending to be home.
I lay down and stared at the ceiling.
Aruna wasn't there. Key wasn't there. Neither were the people who would ask why I had let go of someone beautiful, warm, and—according to them—clearly in love with me.
There was only me.
And for the first time in a long while, I wasn't sure who the person lying there was.
Before Aruna, there was Key.
Before I learned to wait for messages, I had once learned to wait for someone to come home.
My relationship with Key ended without a major explosion. There was no betrayal I could tell other people about to make them hate her. There was no single mistake I could use as an excuse to feel right. We had simply reached a point where staying felt more exhausting than letting go.
After that, people told me to move on quickly.
They didn't mean any harm. They simply didn't know that loneliness could make someone accept anything that sounded like attention.
Aruna came into my life during that time.
At first, she was just a name appearing on my phone screen. Our conversation began with simple things—the food we hadn't had time to eat, piling assignments, the song currently playing, complaints about a day that had gone on too long. She had a way of making ordinary questions sound like concern.
Have you eaten?
You look tired today.
Don't forget to rest.
I read those sentences and felt as if someone were turning on a light in a room Key had just left.
I didn't ask whether the light would last.
I was simply grateful for the brightness.
Aruna never forced me to love her. Maybe I was the one too quick to give the feeling of relief a name. I called it love because the word sounded more beautiful than loneliness. I called it a relationship because that way, I didn't have to admit that most of my time was spent waiting for someone to reply to my messages.
We dated in secret. Not many people knew. We rarely met, and sometimes a whole week passed without seeing each other in person. Still, I held on to the relationship as if distance were only a technical problem that could be solved with patience.
But some distance doesn't stretch between two places.
Some distance grows inside a person when they begin to feel they need permission to be themselves.
I only realized it long after everything was over.
At the time, all I knew was that every notification from Aruna felt like an assignment. Every missed call turned into guilt. Whenever I wanted to be alone, I felt as if I were doing something wrong.
Then my personal problems arrived one by one, without knocking.
I began having trouble sleeping. Trouble concentrating. Small things felt too big, while the things I used to enjoy suddenly had no flavor at all. I kept going to college, kept answering some people, kept smiling when circumstances demanded it. But after it was all over, I would go home and feel as if I had just left my own body somewhere behind.
I didn't want to disappear.
I just didn't know how to remain present.
Two days without opening Aruna's conversation had been enough to end everything.
Afterward, I met Diva.
Or perhaps more accurately, I let Diva into my life because I needed something I could work on with my hands, not something I had to feel with my heart.
We talked about a small business, simple plans, and possibilities that might not work out. Diva was there in a tangible way: sitting across from me, carrying crumpled notes, complaining about the price of supplies, and laughing when I got too serious about calculating the capital.
People began to misunderstand.
They saw us together and made up their own stories. Some said I was stupid for breaking up with Aruna. They compared her looks, her kindness, and everything visible from the outside. No one asked whether I was happy. They only asked why I had left someone who seemed so perfect.
I had no easy answer.
Because how do you explain that someone can be kind, beautiful, and still not be the right place for us to live?
In the end, I decided to distance myself from everything.
Two months.
Not to punish anyone. Not to make people look for me. I just wanted to hear my own thoughts without the sound of outside judgment.
During those two months, I went to places where no one knew my name. I sat alone in cafés that were nearly closing. I wandered along the streets after the rain. I looked for quiet corners of the city where I wouldn't have to pretend I was okay.
I started doing small things I used to enjoy. Reading without checking my phone. Buying the drink I actually wanted. Walking home by the longer route simply because the evening sky looked beautiful from there.
Not everything got better right away.
Life was still life. There were days when getting out of bed felt like an accomplishment. There were days when I missed the people I had cut out of my life. There were days when I blamed myself, then repeated the same question over and over: if I had replied to that message sooner, would everything have been different?
But slowly, I came to understand something.
I can't love other people well if I don't even know what I need for myself.
And maybe, before looking for someone to be my home, I have to learn how to come home to myself.
That night, in the same bedroom, I turned on my phone once more. There were no new messages from Aruna. No messages from Key. No questions from anyone.
I opened the notes app and wrote one sentence:
I'm learning to recognize the stranger who's been living inside my body all this time.
I didn't know whether the sentence truly meant anything.
But for the first time, it felt like it belonged to me.