it hurts like hell

— DP —

If you had not said you were tired,
perhaps I would have stayed a little longer.
Perhaps I would have gathered
every broken piece of our past
and tried to build us a home
out of all the things
that once tore us apart.

I still had words left to tell you.
I still had questions buried in my chest,
and a thousand little reasons
to ask you not to disappear again.

God, I still had so much love
I didn’t know where to put.

But then you said you were tired.

And somehow,
those three words
did what years of silence could not—
they taught me how to leave.

Because how could I ask you to stay
when even the thought of staying
had become a burden to you?

How could I beg for one more chapter
when you had already put the book down,
your hands trembling beneath its weight,
your heart no longer willing
to turn another page?

So I swallowed every argument
I had prepared against goodbye.
I buried every what if
beneath a quiet little smile,
and gave you the only thing
I had never wanted to give you:

my permission to leave.

It’s okay, Pi. You can give up on us.
I have given up on myself, too.

Not because I never wanted you.
Not because the years meant nothing.
Not because the girl who loved you
has finally learned how not to.

But because I cannot keep knocking
on a door you are too tired to open,
and I cannot call it love
if I must be the only one
keeping us alive.

You came back
and, for a little while,
the world returned a piece of my youth.

I heard your voice
and remembered the girl I used to be—
the one who believed
that some people were worth waiting for,
even when waiting became
another word for breaking.

And then, just as gently
as you returned,
you told me you were tired.

So I will not ask you to fight.
I will not ask you to stay.
I will not ask whether you will miss me
when the silence finds you again.

I have asked enough questions
to last a lifetime.

Perhaps you will remember me
on an ordinary afternoon,
in a song we used to know,
or in a passing thought
you will never tell anyone about.

Perhaps I will cross your mind
and leave just as quietly
as I came.

And perhaps, one day,
I will remember you
without feeling the old ache
of a girl who never got to say goodbye.

But tonight,
I am still that girl
standing at the edge of our ending,
with a thousand words in her mouth
and no one left to say them to.

I could have fought for us, Pi.

I really could have.

But you were tired,
and I loved you enough
not to turn my love
into another thing
you needed to escape.

So this is goodbye.

Not the goodbye I dreamed of.
Not the goodbye we deserved.
Not even the goodbye
my heart is ready for.

Just the goodbye
I have finally learned to give.

And before I let this ending become
another unanswered question,
I want to say one thing:

Thank you for coming back one more time.

Thank you for giving me
the closure I never knew
I was still waiting for.

Thank you for letting me hear your voice again,
for allowing me to see you
not as the memory I had preserved,
but as the person you are now.

Maybe your return
was not meant to begin again.
Maybe it was only meant
to help me understand
why we had to end.

And if there is one last thing
I wish you could understand,
it is this:

I did not leave because
I had nothing left to fight for.

I left because
you had nothing left to give.

You were tired of carrying us.
I was tired of carrying the hope
that you would carry us again.

So I will not call this
the love that failed.

I will call it
the love I refused to drag
past its final breath.

You were my first love,
but you will not be
the last place I disappear.

I loved you enough to stay.
I loved you enough to fight.
And when you could no longer meet me there,
I loved myself enough
to stop fighting alone.

That is the part of us
I will carry forward:

not that you left,
not that I was abandoned,
but that I finally understood—

love can be real,
and still be over.

I could have fought for us.

But I will not spend
the rest of my life
proving I was worth staying for.

 When you disappeared in 2016, I spent years learning how to live without you. Every birthday, your little message brought a part of me back to life, even when your replies made it clear that we could never be what we once were.

I thought I had finally made peace with losing you. Then you came back, and suddenly, I was that girl again, still afraid of losing someone who was never truly mine.

Back then, I thought loving you meant accepting second place. Now I know what it feels like to be someone’s priority, and I never want to lose myself that way again.

We have families now, little hearts waiting for us at home. I know we can’t go back, even if some part of me still wishes we could.

If you remember me, remember the girl I was when we were young and wild. She loved you more than she knew how to explain.

And maybe the saddest part is that I have to learn to lose you again, even though I never really got to have you in the first place.

Day 1

Judulnya kembali ke awal ya, udh 10 thn balik lg ke awal reset mindset, belajar happy, belajar ketawa lg wkwkwk

Ga demen gw ni kek gini, closure ga jelas better dr awal gw pagari diri anjay berasa benda pusaka kramat aing wkwkwkw..

Yaudh intinya mah ga suka liat emak2 galau, anak muda galau masih ada gemes2nya ya, lah kalau udh emak2 galauinnya bukan cinta lg ga sih? Harusnya udh sekolah anak, uang belanja 🔪 

🌸 the empty seat

You told me
there was always an empty seat
where I used to be.

You said you left it untouched,
as if ten years of silence
were just another way
of saying I missed you.

And for a moment,
I wanted to believe you.

I wanted to believe
that somewhere between
the years we lost,
the marriages we built,
the children we held,
and the lives we learned to live—

there was still a version of us
sitting quietly together,
waiting for the ending
we never got.

But then I asked myself:

If that seat was really mine,
why did you never call?

Ten years.

Ten birthdays.
Ten years of ordinary mornings.
Ten years of rainy nights.
Ten years when you knew
the world was still big enough
to find me—

and you didn’t.

Maybe you missed me.

Maybe you loved me.

Maybe some part of you
still does.

But love is a strange thing
when it never becomes a choice.

Because you built a life
without me.

You learned how to be a father.
You held another woman’s hand.
You made another home.
You filled the years
I thought belonged to us
with someone else’s name.

And I did the same.

So perhaps that empty seat
was never waiting for me.

Perhaps it was only
the shape of a memory.

A ghost sitting quietly
inside your heart,
just as you became a ghost
inside mine.

And God,
I am tired of ghosts.

I am tired of wondering
whether your I love you
means forever
or only I remember.

I am tired of turning
every word you say
into a doorway
back to 2008,
back to the girl I was,
back to the boy you were,
back to the life
that never happened.

We were real.

That is enough.

We loved.

That is enough.

We lost each other.

That is enough.

I don’t need another kiss.
I don’t need another promise.
I don’t need you to choose me
after all these years
just to prove
that I was worth choosing.

I know I was.

And maybe that
is the last thing
I need to learn from you.

So keep your empty seat.

Keep the memories.
Keep the old conversations.
Keep the version of me
you secretly missed.

I will keep my life.

My children.
My home.
My mornings.
My ordinary days.
My ridiculous laughter.
My future.

And one day,
when your name crosses my mind,
I hope it won’t hurt.

I hope I will simply smile
and think—

God, we were young.

We loved each other once.

And then we grew up.

So this is not
me asking you to stay.

This is me
finally asking myself
to leave.

Not because
you never loved me.

But because
love was never supposed to be
the place where I stopped living.

Goodbye, my almost.

Goodbye,
my first home.

Goodbye
to the empty seat.

I’m coming home to myself now. 

Just a gloomy day

I think this is where I leave you,
not because I stopped caring,
not because you asked me to stay,
and not because we ran out of words.

Maybe that's what hurts the most—
we still had so much to say,
yet none of it could bring us
where we once thought we'd go.

You were never just a person I loved.
You were years of my life,
a thousand little memories,
a version of me
I don't know how to become again.

And perhaps, somewhere inside me,
I kept a door open for you
without even realizing it.

Until today.

Today, I finally closed it.

Not because I hate you.
God, I wish it were that easy.

I leave because I am tired
of finding pieces of you
in every conversation,
in every silence,
in every “how have you been?”
that never meant anything
and somehow meant everything to me.

I don't want another eight years
of almosts,
of maybe,
of talking without going anywhere,
of wondering what we are
while knowing what we aren't.

So this is goodbye.

Not the kind where I wish
you would chase me.

Not the kind where I secretly hope
you'll knock on my door
and finally say everything
I've waited years to hear.

Just goodbye.

I hope you remember me kindly.
Maybe remember the girl I was
before life changed us,
before time made us strangers
who knew each other's hearts too well.

And if someday
you wonder why I disappeared—

please know,

I didn't leave because you meant nothing to me.

I left because
you meant too much,
and I couldn't keep losing myself
just to keep a little piece of you.

So go live your life.

I'll try to live mine.

And maybe,
in another lifetime,
we'll meet before we learn
how to hurt each other.

But in this one—

I loved you.
I lost you.
I found myself.

And this time,

I'm choosing not to lose her again. 🥀

I hope my words could heal every wounds that everyone needs :)

I never asked you to stay forever.

I only wished we had known when forever had already ended.

People often ask me why I can’t move on.

The truth is…

I don’t think I ever had the chance to.

We didn’t end with a fight.

We didn’t end with a goodbye.

There was no final embrace.

No final kiss.

No last “I love you.”

We simply… stopped becoming us.

And somehow, life expected my heart to understand what no one had ever explained.

You left me with unfinished conversations.

With promises suspended somewhere between truth and regret.

With words that were never spoken.

For years, I kept wondering whether I had imagined everything.

Maybe I loved you more.

Maybe I misunderstood.

Maybe I was the fool who believed too much.

But then I remembered…

No one sends good morning texts for years by accident.

No one reads every terrible draft of a girl’s novel by accident.

No one whispers,

“My Mimi… I love you. I adore you. I miss you.”

by accident.

And no one promises,

“I’ll leave her for you.”

without planting hope in another person’s heart.

I don’t know if you lied.

Maybe you meant every word when you said it.

Maybe life changed you.

Maybe fear did.

Maybe love wasn’t enough.

I will probably never know.

And perhaps…

that is the hardest part.

Not losing you.

But losing the explanation.

Sometimes I wonder if you’ve erased me from your memory.

Sometimes I wonder if you ever miss me.

Sometimes I wonder if I was just another chapter while you became an entire book in mine.

Then I remember your answer.

“Sometimes.”

Just one word.

One period.

One lifetime of questions.

For years, I searched for a reason.

I searched in birthdays.

In destiny charts.

In memories.

In cities.

In Bali, where I first flew just to see you.

In Semarang, where you later moved without knowing I had already stopped going there after my grandmother passed away.

I searched everywhere…

except inside the only place that still needed healing.

My own heart.

Perhaps I wasn’t waiting for you.

Perhaps I was waiting for the goodbye we never had.

And maybe that’s why I wrote Keyra and Devan.

Not because I wanted to rewrite reality.

But because fiction gave me something life never did.

A chance to finish the sentence.

A chance to let two people choose each other one last time.

A chance to whisper,

“Goodbye.”

without losing the love that once existed.

Because love doesn’t become fake simply because it ends.

It becomes a memory.

A beautiful one.

A painful one.

But still…

a memory.

Today, I finally understand something.

I don’t need to prove that I mattered.

I mattered.

Whether you remember me every day…

or only sometimes.

Whether you loved me forever…

or only for a season.

What we had changed me.

It made me believe in stories.

It made me believe my words deserved to exist.

It made me become the writer I am today.

And while I was busy mourning the future we never had…

Life quietly gave me another kind of love.

The kind that runs into my arms without asking who I used to love.

The kind that calls me “Mama.”

The kind that doesn’t need promises because it already belongs to me.

For the longest time…

I thought you were my first home.

Maybe you were.

But home is not always the place where we stay forever.

Sometimes…

home is simply the place that teaches us what love feels like before life asks us to build one of our own.

So this is not a goodbye to you.

It is a goodbye…

to the woman who kept waiting for one.

I release the future we never had.

I keep the gratitude.

I keep the memories.

I keep the girl who flew to Bali just to spend one more day with the man she loved.

I keep her because she loved honestly.

And she deserves tenderness, not shame.

As for you…

I hope life has been kind.

I hope you found peace.

I hope, every once in a while, when my name crosses your mind…

you smile.

Not because you wish we had chosen differently.

But because, for a little while…

we loved each other with everything we had.

And maybe…

for this lifetime…

that was enough.