There was a time when I thought love was supposed to fill every empty space in your heart. And for a while, it did. Being with them felt like breathing fresh air after being underwater for too long. Everything had color. Every little thing—messages, laughs, plans—felt like a thread stitching my life together.
But when the relationship ended, it was as if someone pulled the plug and drained everything out of me.
At first, the emptiness was loud. Deafening, even. I’d lie in bed replaying conversations, wondering what I should’ve done differently, how we went from everything to nothing. I missed the good mornings, the random check-ins, the way I didn’t have to explain myself to be understood. All of it was gone, and it left a silence behind that echoed through my days.
I thought time would heal it—and in some ways, it did. But something unexpected happened too.
The emptiness stopped hurting after a while. Not because I was better, but because I got used to it. I stopped waiting for messages. I stopped checking old photos. I stopped expecting them to walk back into my life. The numbness, the absence—they became my new normal. I could function, I could laugh, I could show up for people—but inside, I felt… flat.
That’s the thing no one tells you: heartbreak doesn’t always come with fireworks. Sometimes it fades so slowly that you don’t even realize you’re still carrying the weight of it.
Looking back now, I see how much of myself I had to rebuild. I had to relearn how to enjoy my own company. I had to fill my life with things that didn’t revolve around “us.” And most of all, I had to remind myself that just because the emptiness became normal, didn’t mean it had to stay that way.
The quote “The emptiness feels normal after a while” is real. I lived it. But it’s also a quiet invitation to feel again. To trust again. To love again—not someone else at first, but yourself.
And eventually, that space they left behind? It didn’t feel like a void anymore. It felt like a place I could grow into.