Why I Had to Break My Own Heart Before Breaking Yours

a letter to my ex + notes on need vs desire

TL;DR: listen carefully to the lyrics

Note: I went to my friend Gabby, who also happens to be a couples and family therapist, after an epiphany during one of my many introspective sessions about how I’m ‘handling’ life. Over the backdrop of wailing sirens and late-night traffic, I sent her a voice memo that went something like this:

My voice memo:

Gabby’s response:

“This is the time” time meaning that spongey grey area of being let go of my job and letting go of my first love within 24 hours (both expiring at four years).

So yeah. This is me leaning into whatever this is above. For the record, the price I had to pay to finish writing this is every ounce of water in my body (from all the crying). I feel more anemic than usual after hitting the publish button, so give me grace, and somebody please pass me a fucking glass of water.

I counted the months from August until now, trying to rationalize this time. I picked each month apart, down to the weeks and days, wondering if seven months was enough time to write about this–about you. How do I neatly define four years and package the hollow beginnings of an ending in seven months? How do I convince myself that I still have some words left to write about you? How do I know you’re even reading this right now? I don’t. But I know you will.

I made fun of you for never reading a single thing except the back of nutrition labels on GNC products. But you always read my work diligently. Sincerely. I loved that about you. How you cared for my words, all of them. Even the ones that came out of my mouth that Sunday morning in August, when I told you “This wasn’t working anymore.”

Monday night, I didn’t expect to burst into tears. I wasn’t even high. I was wearing a turmeric-neem face mask, making a protein smoothie while my potatoes were baking in dairy-free parmesan and Italian seasoning. But then the notifications on my phone brightly outlined your name in an email address, liking a poem I wrote on Substack. In the same digital breath, I was rejected by a company I had just finished applying to that morning. Tears possessed my eyes instantly until I was hunched over the sink choking over my spit. Snot dripped down my nostrils and fell desperately over my drying rack.

You know when I get sad, I like to wash the dishes. I remembered that as I was seemingly washing them with my tears.

And then in my rushed (as always) efforts to move away, I somehow managed to break a small Japanese soy sauce dish. It was from my favorite kitchenware store in the city, MTC Kitchen. I cried harder. I hated how I always moved haphazardly, with everything. How idiotically clumsy I was. Still. Everyone knows I’m either dropping something or breaking something every day. I wish I wasn’t like this. I wish I moved slower, with less intensity. In the years we were together, though I never stopped being clumsy, your hands always steadied mine, in every possible way.

When I broke the dish, I imagined you shaking your head and blowing a frustrated breath out of your mouth. You would smile after. You couldn’t help it. I loved how easily you accepted the things I would make and break with equal measure.

I feel so lucky to have been loved by someone like you for the first time, you know that? I didn’t think I could be loved in so many ways. Ways I’m still making sense of now. They’re unfolding in front of me and I’m trying to catch them, breathlessly counting them like pieces of a meteor shower I’ll never see in this lifetime.

I grew up forbidden to entertain the notion of romantic love, despite my very existence being a symbol of it. I regret not dating in high school. I regret not falling for someone in college. I was jealous of my friends who went through breakups early, collecting exes as if they were registering for classes each semester.

When we met, I was 22, and you were 24. We are now older than the versions of ourselves who first crossed paths. We are lucky to be aging–maybe not together anymore, but still, in parallel, in some dimension of time that makes sense only to us.

Until I met you, my heart had only ever been filled with school crushes, unrequited daydreams, and flashes of early 2000s rom-coms. Now, my only true reference for love is the kind you showed me. And if I were cursed to never love again, I would be content knowing what we had was enough.

I remember telling you that you were the first man in my life who showed me what love was. But I never got the chance to tell you that you also held up a mirror to me–so I could learn to love myself through you and accept nothing less in the future.

Can I tell you about the things I miss now? I promise I’ll be quick.

I miss your hand on mine when I’d start crying in the movie theater. You’d anticipate which scenes would shake me and grab my hand, squeezing it tight, and I’d laugh through my nose.

I miss the way you’d squint outside, even when it was cloudy because you forgot to wear your contacts. I could press a finger at the dip where your brows met when furrowed.

I miss when you’d call just to remind me to look outside–to catch the moon or the cotton candy sunset–because you knew how excited I’d get. I made you fall in love with the moon and sky too, even if you won’t admit it.

I miss when you’d shake me off like an extra layer of winter clothing at night, and twist to the side. “You turn into a furnace”, you’d say in the morning.

I miss your stupid laugh. The one that kind of wheezes when I say something really funny or do something really silly. You’re good at raising one eyebrow after too. I realized I never asked you to teach me how to do that.

I miss your loud dad-sneezes. I miss your big lion-like yawns, saliva strands stretching inside your mouth. I miss squeezing the pores on your nose and swatting your hand off when you’d try to reach for mine next.

I miss the way you’d quickly order medicine when you found out I caught a cold or had a sinus infection (again).

I miss you practicing your Italian and Spanish next to me. Most importantly, I miss you practicing Telugu with me. You were doing really well.

I miss the way you'd pull out Candy Crush whenever we were stuck in a long line or riding the NJ Transit.

I miss your big arms and chest. I miss your buzzcuts and fades. I miss you trying to grow facial hair. I miss the way you loved my natural, curly hair.

I miss watching Hindi movies with you. I miss watching Telugu movies with you.

I miss the way you look at me when I dress up. I miss going to the gym with you. I miss crying over the phone, complaining to you about how ugly my body looked that day. I miss you comforting me. I miss you believing in me. It frightened me, how much you believed in me.

I miss your functional gift-giving tendencies. You never understood the concept of an aesthetic floral arrangement, but you got me high-quality shit that I use every single day. It’s annoying because I need them so I can’t even throw them out.

I miss how you’d call me by my real name. The name is only known to family and classmates who met me just a few years post-immigration. Prapthi. I get sad thinking about how few people in this world know me as her. Aside from my siblings, Prapthi will cease to exist when my parents pass away. But I find comfort knowing I shared that name with you. I hope you’ll keep her with you, even as you move on from Prathigna.

I miss telling you everything on my mind–even the things that should have stayed there. And then you would kiss my forehead, hold my hand, and listen closely with the kindest eyes I’d ever seen. I loved looking into them. They rejected lies, deception, and contempt. They held only warmth.

You were once mine. Now, you’re just a soul I once knew. And I know the person who will one day share a beautiful future with you will love you the way you were meant to be loved. I bet she, too, will drown in your eyes. Promise me they will stay the same.

Now, I have to admit that I had to break my own heart first before breaking yours last August. I spent the year before slowly bending my reality, testing how the world would re-arrange itself in front of me if I chose a different path–a path that did not include moving in together, leaving New York, getting engaged, getting married, buying a house, having kids, and tucking myself away beneath the wood of a picket fence painted in eggshell white.

The book I’m using as a reference for my novel describes what makes a compelling character. In The Anatomy of Story, John Truby writes, “The need is what the hero must fulfill within himself in order to have a better life. It usually involves overcoming his weakness and changing, or growing in some way.”

He goes on to explain how desire is intimately connected to need: “Need and desire also have different functions in relation to the audience. Need lets the audience see how the hero must change to have a better life. Desire is on the surface and is what the audience thinks the story is about. Desire is the goal outside the character.”

Desire has always led me to chase stability. And stability led me to you. It kept me safe in your arms for four years. But at the start of 2024, I began thinking deeply about what my relationship with stability actually looked like–if not through a long-term partner, a six-figure job, a retirement plan, and the security of the American Dream my parents brought me to this country to chase.

But I reached a point–26 to be specific–where I rejected the line I had drawn for myself as a child. The line that told me to play by the rules of life and eventually live 'happily ever after' with someone, my one true love. I asked myself where I would be if I erased that line. If I sat with myself, staring at an empty page with zero direction, unable to find the demarcation of an ending or a beginning. Chaos was all I saw at every angle.

Aside from our innate incompatibility and the subtle misdirection of our futures, fear forced me to dismantle that version of myself. The version that worshipped stability as if her life depended on it (because for a while, it did).

I was more fearful of living a life I thought I wanted than of living a life where I had to start over–a life I had no control over, no plan for. A year before we broke up, I kept watching myself, detached from my body, living a life that wasn’t truly mine. I felt estranged in my presence, in the way I would laugh, smile, or kiss. It didn’t make sense to me because nothing terrible happened. We were the textbook example of a PBS relationship: healthy, communicative, honest, kind, and patient. Maybe that was the problem. I’m not sure.

A friend reminded me weeks after the breakup that a situation didn’t need to be bad for me to leave it. Accepting what I wanted and didn’t want was enough to walk away. But I couldn’t accept that easily back then, because that something was someone. It was you. A full human being with a beating heart that once held mine.

How could I give up on us? It was a reality I entertained, but to commit to the decision meant reaching inside my heart–one that, up until now, had only beaten for you–and squeezing it until every drop of blood drained. And so I did. I put my heart back in my chest and forced it to start again–this time, allowing it to beat to a new and unfamiliar rhythm.

I’m unsure whether I have a clear view of what my need is now, after seven months of this new reality. Needs are subject to change, and I’ve been changing at a frightening pace. It scared you then, and it scares me now at how fast I’ve been changing. I wish I wasn’t, but I do feel different. I feel free. I feel more like myself–or a version of myself I’m starting to feel proud of.

I’ve always been hyper-independent (you knew this when we first started talking), but you’d be surprised to know that I’ve been letting people in. I wept the first time I felt taken care of when I asked for help. I cursed at myself for not asking for this sooner. I questioned what reward I was seeking by telling myself I had to do everything entirely on my own.

Though, inevitably, I have to walk this new life alone, I’m clearer on what I want now. A new desire is emerging, even as my need is still taking shape. I want to write this book. I want to unapologetically bet on myself and my dreams. I’ve fallen in love with my creative journey, carving out an unconventional path that promises no money, no job security, and no peace of mind. Choosing a man, falling in love, and forming a relationship? That’s not even on the radar for a very, very long time. Maybe never, honestly. I can imagine a future where I’m okay with never marrying, never having kids, never buying my first house.

“B-b-but Prathigna, you don’t know until you meet the right person!” people say. I don’t care. I tell them, contrary to what I’ve been taught, finding a partner and 'winning at love' is not the purpose of this life of mine. Call me naive, but I’m being so fucking clear when I say this: I do not exist just to find someone to love or be loved. I’m here to tell stories.

I’m here to write. I’m here to observe and taste the world–the heartaches, the loves and losses, the intimacy with fear, death, longing, and pain. And that’s simply enough.

Stability was more than a desire; it was a dream I had to wake up from. Chaos? That’s the truth. And I’m starting to make peace with it.

Thank you for everything, I'll always hold on to the way you loved me.

Yours for the last time,

Prathigna

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