I hated when you told me about that dream where I was bald. It felt like a violation of some unspoken rule—the kind where lovers shouldn’t expose each other’s imagined vulnerabilities. Yet here I am, digging through mental archives for that exact memory, replaying your laughter when I scowled at the description. The irony isn’t lost on me: the things we resist hardest often become the artifacts we cling to.
They told me three months would be enough. Three months to reset neural pathways, to stop checking my phone for weather updates from a city I’ve never visited. Three months until your badminton stories would fade into white noise. But no one warned me about the specificity of grief—how a particular shade of gray in the sky or the way steam rises from coffee could tunnel straight back to those mornings when your messages about the cold would arrive before my alarm went off.
The bald dream wasn’t even the worst one. There was that time you dreamed we adopted a three-legged cat and named it after your ex. Or the recurring one where we kept missing each other at airports, always boarding gates just out of reach. Funny how dreams become currency in long-distance relationships, their absurdity somehow making the absence more bearable. We’d patch together intimacy from these nocturnal fragments, your subconscious becoming as familiar as your waking self.
What they don’t tell you about healing is how it moves in reverse sometimes. The first month was clean, almost clinical in its emptiness. Then the second month brought back the smell of rain on concrete—the exact scent that lingered during our 3AM calls when you’d whisper about missing the tropics. By the third month, I caught myself saving ugly WhatsApp stickers that reminded me of your terrible taste. Progress isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral that keeps passing through the same points at different altitudes.
The weather app still pings. I haven’t deleted the location—not out of hope, but because erasing it would mean admitting how much space your absence takes up. There’s a particular cruelty to digital remnants; unlike physical objects, they don’t gather dust. Your last message about the snowstorm still looks freshly sent, the read receipt glaring like an unhealed wound.
Maybe this is what unequal love leaves behind—not just heartbreak, but a museum of mundane relics. The ticket stubs from movies we never saw together. The half-finished playlist where my songs outnumber yours three to one. That damned bald dream, now polished smooth from constant handling, its edges worn down like sea glass.
They were wrong about the three months. Time doesn’t heal; it just teaches you to carry the weight differently. Some days it’s a pebble in my pocket. Other days it’s the entire geology of us pressing down on my sternum. And on the rare good days? It’s just weather—passing, ordinary, and utterly indifferent.
The Sting of Memory
The WhatsApp stickers you used to send haunt me now – those ridiculous pandas with their exaggerated grins, the ones I’d roll my eyes at while secretly saving to my favorites. At 2:37 AM last Tuesday, I noticed the ‘read’ receipt still glowing beneath our last exchange, like some digital tombstone marking where our conversations went to die.
Your weather updates became my personal meteorology of grief. Every time I feel that particular chill in the air – not just cold, but that specific dampness you always complained about – my fingers twitch toward my phone before remembering. The muscle memory of missing someone operates on its own schedule, indifferent to how many months have passed.
That dream you had about me going bald – the one that made me hang up on you mid-call – has somehow become precious. I reconstruct it like archaeologists piecing together broken pottery: your laughter crackling through the phone, my exaggerated outrage, the way we turned something so stupid into an inside joke. What I wouldn’t give now to be angry about that dream again.
These fragments float to the surface at random – the smell of a badminton shuttlecock (you were terrible at explaining your matches but I’d listen anyway), the particular shade of blue in winter sky photos you’d send just to say ‘thinking of you.’ Mundane moments I resented in their happening have become sacred in their absence.
The irony isn’t lost on me – how the very things that annoyed me then have transformed into relics I handle with gloves. Your daily ‘good morning’ messages that felt like obligation now seem like artifacts from some lost civilization where we still belonged to each other. I catch myself missing even the silences, the comfortable pauses where we’d run out of things to say but stayed on the line anyway.
Memory works in cruel paradoxes: the sharper the initial irritation, the deeper the eventual ache. That stupid bald dream sits in my mental museum now, displayed beside other exhibits of our ordinary magic – the inside jokes that stopped being funny, the plans that never materialized, the future tense we gradually stopped using.
Somewhere between the last ‘sayang’ and the first unanswered message, these fragments fossilized. Now they surface without warning – a particular emoji combination, the way certain afternoon light hits my desk – pulling me back into what I thought I’d archived.
The Lie of Time
I deleted our chat history on day twelve. A clean break, or so I told myself. The little trash can icon blinked twice before swallowing two years of inside jokes, midnight confessions, and those ridiculous panda stickers you loved. My thumb hovered over ‘confirm’ for three breaths—the exact duration it used to take you to reply whenever I asked something serious.
On day forty-seven, the supermarket muzak played that indie song we streamed during your insomnia nights. My stomach lurched like I’d swallowed battery acid. The cashier stared as I abandoned a full cart by the organic kale, your voice suddenly loud in my head: ‘We should learn to cook with this someday.’ Someday. That treacherous word we treated like currency.
By day eighty-three, my subconscious betrayed me. You messaged me in a dream—not with words but a new sticker, some absurd cartoon frog wearing sunglasses. I woke up reaching for my phone before remembering. Again. The brain’s cruel habit of erasing grief upon waking, only to remember anew.
Time is not medicine. It’s just a diluting agent.
They sell us this narrative of healing as linear progression: two weeks to stop crying, three months to date again, a year until you’re ‘over it.’ But grief doesn’t read self-help articles. It loops. It lingers in the banal—the way my fingers still automatically type ‘h’ in the search bar, expecting your name to appear. The way I catch myself noting the weather in your timezone, though no one’s asking anymore.
The receipts don’t expire. Every ‘last time’ stays preserved in emotional formaldehyde: the final Starbucks cup with your lipstick mark, the last Spotify playlist you curated (‘For When You Miss Me’—a joke that turned prophecy), even that final argument about nothing that somehow meant everything.
Three months in, I realized time wasn’t healing the wound. It was just teaching me how to limp better.
Digital Artifacts We Can’t Delete
The last message still sits there, unopened for months now. A single word: cold. The irony isn’t lost on me—how something so mundane became the final punctuation mark to what we were. That little blue bubble with its passive-aggressive read receipt mocks me every time I scroll past.
Digital grief works differently than the old-fashioned kind. Our breakup left no physical traces—no shared toothbrushes to throw away, no hoodies smelling of someone else’s detergent. Just these stubborn artifacts:
- The Archived Conversations
WhatsApp’s archive function is the modern equivalent of shoving mementos under the bed. Out of sight, technically, until 2AM when muscle memory guides your thumb to that hidden folder. The stickers you hated—those ridiculous dancing vegetables—now feel like relics from a lost civilization. - The Self-Sabotage Scroll
There’s a particular cruelty to how smartphones organize memories. That On This Day notification showing your “happy anniversary” message from three years ago. The weather app that still defaults to your city. I’ve developed a ritual: every Tuesday evening, deliberately rereading our last argument like picking at a scab. - The Counterintuitive Cure
A therapist once suggested I send those awful stickers to myself. Own the memory before it owns you. So now my camera roll has screenshots of our dumbest exchanges—me complaining about burnt toast, you responding with eggplant emojis. It hurts less when you take away their power to surprise.
Digital grieving isn’t about deletion. It’s learning to live with these ghosts in the machine. That cold message? I’ve stopped trying to interpret its meaning. Some days it’s just a word about weather. Others, it’s the entire emotional climate of a relationship’s end.
What no one prepares you for is how the most trivial things become landmines. A Spotify playlist auto-generating your rainy day mix. Google Photos suggesting Stitch this panorama from that weekend we pretended to be tourists in our own city. The algorithms don’t know we’re over—sometimes I’m not convinced they’re wrong.
There’s freedom in accepting we’ll never cleanly erase each other. Our relationship exists now as metadata—a series of timestamps and reaction emojis. Maybe that’s the modern version of closure: not absence of evidence, but learning to let the evidence just be.
The Unequal Measure
The numbers never lie. My phone’s screen time report showed an 83% dominance in message initiation—those little blue bubbles stretching further down the screen than your gray replies ever did. Of those, 62% contained some variation of “when we…” or “next time we’ll…”, future tense constructions that now read like speculative fiction. The imbalance wasn’t dramatic, no shouting matches or silent treatments, just the quiet arithmetic of attachment: three heart emojis to your one, five goodnight texts unanswered, seven weather updates about my sunny afternoons met with your two-word acknowledgments of distant snowfall.
Then came the turning point my therapist would later call “the metrics of liberation”—the day my screen time dropped 47% because I stopped drafting paragraphs about why we deserved a shared tomorrow. The absence of those unsent manifestos created digital white space where your notifications used to live. I remember staring at the sudden emptiness where my thumbs usually danced, realizing I’d been writing our future alone in a collaborative document where you’d never requested edit access.
What fascinates me now isn’t the leaving but the physics of it—how withdrawal from unequal love creates its own sensory vacuum. Your chronic complaints about the cold (“It’s snowing again, fucking hell”) had seeped into my subtropical bones until I found myself wearing cardigans in 30°C weather. Months after our last contact, I finally understood: cold wasn’t your climate, it was the unit we’d used to measure our emotional temperatures. Your chill became my habituation, a wearable memory I kept pulling tighter around myself long after you’d stopped feeling it.
These measurements linger when the emotions blur. The precise 2:17 AM timestamp on our last conversation. The 11-minute gap between your “okay” and my next attempt to reconnect. The way my phone’s predictive text still suggests your name when I type “I miss…” The metrics of missing defy the healing timelines they sell in self-help books—there’s no standard deviation for how long a particular WhatsApp sticker should haunt you, no normal distribution curve for dreams about someone’s hypothetical baldness.
I thought love was supposed to be immeasurable, yet here I am with these absurd calculations: if I divide the number of times I almost texted you by the number of deep breaths taken instead, does the quotient make me strong or just proficient at restraint? When I subtract your half-hearted promises from my whole-hearted hopes, why does the remainder still feel like something more than zero? The coldest realization isn’t about your lack of effort, but how my capacity to keep loving somehow expanded to compensate for it—like blood vessels dilating in thin mountain air.
Now when people say “love shouldn’t be this hard,” I think of you teaching me to distinguish between difficult and unequal. Between the beautiful struggle of two people paddling the same canoe through rough waters, and the exhausting reality of one person dragging the boat while the other trails fingers in the water. The cold you complained about wasn’t meteorological—it was the atmospheric pressure of my expectations meeting your emotional availability. And like all weather systems, it eventually passed. What remains isn’t the storm but the strange comfort in having learned to recognize its particular barometric signature.
The cursor blinks on an unsent draft, the words half-formed yet heavy with everything left unspoken. There’s a particular cruelty in how the mind resurrects fragments we’ve tried to bury—the mundane, the ridiculous, the things we swore didn’t matter. Like that absurd dream where I was bald, the one I pretended to hate when you told me, rolling my eyes at your laughter. Now I’d give anything to hear you recount it again, even if it means enduring the teasing.
Grief doesn’t follow the timelines we assign it. Three months, six months—these are arbitrary markers we cling to, as if healing could be measured in calendar squares. The truth is messier: some days feel like progress, until a song in a grocery store or a sudden rainstorm drags you back to square one. Digital relics make it worse. Those WhatsApp stickers you loved—the grotesquely cute pandas, the exaggerated eye rolls—still live in my archived chats, waiting to ambush me when I least expect it.
What no one prepares you for is the asymmetry of missing. The way certain memories become hyper-vivid (your complaint about the cold, the way you’d send weather updates as conversational lifelines) while others fade into fog. The brain prioritizes all the wrong things. Scientists might call it ‘selective memory,’ but it feels more like a betrayal—your own mind weaponizing nostalgia against you.
And then there’s the arithmetic of heartbreak. The unconscious tallying: who texted first, who planned more meetups, who fought harder for hypothetical futures. At some point, the imbalance becomes impossible to ignore. You stop convincing yourself—and them—that love could ever be measured in equal cups.
Yet here’s the paradox: leaving doesn’t erase the habit of longing. The body remembers what the mind tries to forget. Your fingers still hover over unsent messages; your dreams still script alternate endings to arguments you never resolved.
[Unsaved draft: Maybe the baldness was symbolic. Maybe I was already disappearing.]
