He left without a word. Five years later, he is still not sure he can explain why.
Her name was Priya.
We met at a mutual friend’s house in Taman Desa, one of those impromptu Saturday gatherings that starts at seven and ends at two in the morning. She was sitting on the floor with her back against the sofa, laughing at something someone said, and I remember thinking she was the most at-ease person I had ever seen in a room full of strangers.
We talked for four hours that night. Just the two of us, eventually while everyone else drifted to different corners of the house. I drove her home at midnight because her Grab kept cancelling. She lived in Cheras. I lived in Kepong. It was completely out of the way and I did not mind at all.
That was August 2018. By October we were seeing each other almost every day.
I want to be honest here about what we had because I think it matters for what comes after. It was not casual. It was not a situationship or whatever word people use now for something they cannot quite define. It was real and it was good and she was one of the most genuinely kind people I have ever met in my life. The kind of person who remembers small things. Who asks follow-up questions and shows up when you need them.
I was 28. She was 26. Neither of us was looking for anything when we found each other and maybe that was exactly why it worked so well. We were together for almost a year.
In that year I met her parents. I ate at her family’s table in Seremban on Deepavali. I knew the names of her colleagues, her childhood best friend, the uncle she did not get along with. She knew mine. She knew things about me that I had never said out loud to another person, things I had not planned to say, that came out in the particular ease of being with someone who makes you feel completely safe. That ease, I now understand, was exactly what undid me.
Because I had never felt safe like that before. Not with anyone. I grew up in a house where love came with conditions attached, where affection was something you earned and could lose without warning. I did not know, at 28, that I had built an entire internal architecture around that childhood. That somewhere deep in me I had decided that love which felt easy was love that was about to be taken away.
Priya did not feel like the love I recognised. The love I recognised was anxious and electric and kept you off balance. What she gave me was steady and consistent and I did not know what to do with it.
I kept waiting for something to go wrong. For her to reveal a cruelty I had missed. For the version of her that was too good to be real to show up eventually. When it did not, when month after month she was simply and reliably herself, I started to panic in a way I could not name or explain or even fully feel consciously. I just knew, one day, that I could not pick up the phone.
She had done nothing wrong. I had stopped caring. In fact I think it was the opposite. I think I cared so much that it felt like standing at the edge of something very high and looking down. And instead of stepping back from the edge I just disappeared.
I did not plan it. I want to say this, even though I know it does not make it better. There was no decision, I didn’t wake up one morning and thought “today is the day I destroy something good.” It started with one unanswered message. Then another. Then it had been four days and I did not know how to explain four days so I let it become a week and then a week became the rest of my life.
She called and texted. She left a voice note I have listened to more times than I will admit.
where she just says my name and asks if she did something wrong and says she hopes I am okay. I listened to it and did nothing.
I have thought about that voice note more times than I can count, in the years since. The particular cruelty of it was that she was worried about me while I was the one who had hurt her. That her first instinct was to check if I was okay. That is who she was and that is who I walked away from.
I know what ghosting is. I know what it does to a person, the way it takes the ordinary human decency of an ending and removes it, leaves someone standing in a silence they cannot interpret, replaying everything looking for the answer to a question they were never given the chance to ask. I have had it done to me once, briefly, by someone I was not even that serious about, and I remember how it felt, a humiliation of not being worth an explanation.
I did that to someone I loved. Someone who deserved better than I gave almost anyone in my life.
There is a version of this story where I tell you I have figured out exactly why I did it. Where I lay out the psychology cleanly and it all makes sense and you understand. My therapist has helped me get closer to that version. The childhood stuff, the avoidant attachment, the fear of intimacy dressed up as self-protection.
But I do not think the clean version is honest. The honest version is that I was a 28-year-old man who had something real and good and got so frightened of losing it that I burned it down myself, and then spent five years trying to understand why and still do not have an answer that fully satisfies me.
Last year I found out through a friend that Priya is in a relationship now. Someone decent, from what I hear. I felt something, a complicated thing I do not have a clean word for. Relief, maybe. A little grief. The sadness of knowing that a door you closed yourself is now locked from the other side forever.
I think about reaching out sometimes. I have typed messages and deleted them. An apology, I tell myself. Closure, for her. But I am honest enough with myself to know that it would really be for me. She has moved on. The kindest thing I can probably do now is stay out of her way.
But I also think about that voice note. About the fact that she never got to be angry at me, not really, because I never gave her a target. About all the ways silence can be its own kind of violence without ever raising a hand.
I am 33 now. I am in therapy. I am, my therapist tells me, making progress on the things that made me do what I did. Maybe that is true.
But I do not know what to do with the progress. I do not know if becoming a better person five years too late counts for anything, or if it is just something I am doing for myself while she lives her life and has no idea I think about that voice note at two in the morning more often than I would like to admit.
I do not know if I should reach out. I do not know if silence, at this point, is the kindest thing or just the easiest thing for me. I still look her up sometimes just to know she is okay.
I am not sure there is a difference anymore.
Submit your story to ym.efillaerni@olleh and you may be featured on In Real Life Malaysia.
Read also: ‘I gave up my family to pursue my dreams’ Shares 34 YO M’sian woman – In Real Life
https://inreallife.my/i-gave-up-my-family-to-pursue-my-dreams-shares-34-yo-msian-woman/
He left without a word. Five years later, he is still not sure he can explain why.
Her name was Priya.
We met at a mutual friend’s house in Taman Desa, one of those impromptu Saturday gatherings that starts at seven and ends at two in the morning. She was sitting on the floor with her back against the sofa, laughing at something someone said, and I remember thinking she was the most at-ease person I had ever seen in a room full of strangers.
We talked for four hours that night. Just the two of us, eventually while everyone else drifted to different corners of the house. I drove her home at midnight because her Grab kept cancelling. She lived in Cheras. I lived in Kepong. It was completely out of the way and I did not mind at all.
That was August 2018. By October we were seeing each other almost every day.
I want to be honest here about what we had because I think it matters for what comes after. It was not casual. It was not a situationship or whatever word people use now for something they cannot quite define. It was real and it was good and she was one of the most genuinely kind people I have ever met in my life. The kind of person who remembers small things. Who asks follow-up questions and shows up when you need them.
I was 28. She was 26. Neither of us was looking for anything when we found each other and maybe that was exactly why it worked so well. We were together for almost a year.
In that year I met her parents. I ate at her family’s table in Seremban on Deepavali. I knew the names of her colleagues, her childhood best friend, the uncle she did not get along with. She knew mine. She knew things about me that I had never said out loud to another person, things I had not planned to say, that came out in the particular ease of being with someone who makes you feel completely safe. That ease, I now understand, was exactly what undid me.
Because I had never felt safe like that before. Not with anyone. I grew up in a house where love came with conditions attached, where affection was something you earned and could lose without warning. I did not know, at 28, that I had built an entire internal architecture around that childhood. That somewhere deep in me I had decided that love which felt easy was love that was about to be taken away.
Priya did not feel like the love I recognised. The love I recognised was anxious and electric and kept you off balance. What she gave me was steady and consistent and I did not know what to do with it.
I kept waiting for something to go wrong. For her to reveal a cruelty I had missed. For the version of her that was too good to be real to show up eventually. When it did not, when month after month she was simply and reliably herself, I started to panic in a way I could not name or explain or even fully feel consciously. I just knew, one day, that I could not pick up the phone.
She had done nothing wrong. I had stopped caring. In fact I think it was the opposite. I think I cared so much that it felt like standing at the edge of something very high and looking down. And instead of stepping back from the edge I just disappeared.
I did not plan it. I want to say this, even though I know it does not make it better. There was no decision, I didn’t wake up one morning and thought “today is the day I destroy something good.” It started with one unanswered message. Then another. Then it had been four days and I did not know how to explain four days so I let it become a week and then a week became the rest of my life.
She called and texted. She left a voice note I have listened to more times than I will admit, where she just says my name and asks if she did something wrong and says she hopes I am okay. I listened to it and did nothing.
I have thought about that voice note more times than I can count, in the years since. The particular cruelty of it was that she was worried about me while I was the one who had hurt her. That her first instinct was to check if I was okay. That is who she was and that is who I walked away from.
I know what ghosting is. I know what it does to a person, the way it takes the ordinary human decency of an ending and removes it, leaves someone standing in a silence they cannot interpret, replaying everything looking for the answer to a question they were never given the chance to ask. I have had it done to me once, briefly, by someone I was not even that serious about, and I remember how it felt, a humiliation of not being worth an explanation.
I did that to someone I loved. Someone who deserved better than I gave almost anyone in my life.
There is a version of this story where I tell you I have figured out exactly why I did it. Where I lay out the psychology cleanly and it all makes sense and you understand. My therapist has helped me get closer to that version. The childhood stuff, the avoidant attachment, the fear of intimacy dressed up as self-protection.
But I do not think the clean version is honest. The honest version is that I was a 28-year-old man who had something real and good and got so frightened of losing it that I burned it down myself, and then spent five years trying to understand why and still do not have an answer that fully satisfies me.
Last year I found out through a friend that Priya is in a relationship now. Someone decent, from what I hear. I felt something, a complicated thing I do not have a clean word for. Relief, maybe. A little grief. The sadness of knowing that a door you closed yourself is now locked from the other side forever.
I think about reaching out sometimes. I have typed messages and deleted them. An apology, I tell myself. Closure, for her. But I am honest enough with myself to know that it would really be for me. She has moved on. The kindest thing I can probably do now is stay out of her way.
But I also think about that voice note. About the fact that she never got to be angry at me, not really, because I never gave her a target. About all the ways silence can be its own kind of violence without ever raising a hand.
I am 33 now. I am in therapy. I am, my therapist tells me, making progress on the things that made me do what I did. Maybe that is true.
But I do not know what to do with the progress. I do not know if becoming a better person five years too late counts for anything, or if it is just something I am doing for myself while she lives her life and has no idea I think about that voice note at two in the morning more often than I would like to admit.
I do not know if I should reach out. I do not know if silence, at this point, is the kindest thing or just the easiest thing for me. I still look her up sometimes just to know she is okay.
I am not sure there is a difference anymore.
Submit your story to ym.efillaerni@olleh and you may be featured on In Real Life Malaysia.
Read also: ‘I gave up my family to pursue my dreams’ Shares 34 YO M’sian woman – In Real Life
https://inreallife.my/i-gave-up-my-family-to-pursue-my-dreams-shares-34-yo-msian-woman/
‘I gave up my family to pursue my dreams’ Shares 34 YO M’sian woman
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