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.
