The Silence after the Discard.

The Silence after the Discard is deafening. It leaves you questioning everything you thought was real.

Sat on his couch, her knees pulled up close to her chest. That morning before work, he had told her while walking out the door that there was no future for him without children. That was it - he just walked away and closed the door to his apartment behind him.

What came that night was the end of the discussion.
The discard, as she would come to call it in the weeks and months that followed.

The silence after the discard was deafening. It left her questioning everything she had spent the last twelve months believing was real. It wasn’t just his absence of words or lack of presence in her life - it was the sudden void where a connection she had once thought lived, now eerily empty.

Not even four days earlier, she had been wrapped up in what had felt like meaning, affection, and promise. And now, there was nothing. He was gone. No closure, no explanation - just nonsense sentences he had practised as an excuse for what was happening.
He had been too busy to explain, so the silence became so loud it rattled the very foundation of the reality she had built.

She sat with the silence, trying to understand how something that had felt so vivid could vanish without warning. He had warned her though hadn’t he. He’d told her the playbook he’d ended his last relationship with. It was replaying now with her. He’d even borrowed from her history to really nail the coffin.
She replayed conversations, over analysed gestures and offhand remarks, examined text messages like evidence in a case that would never go to trial.
Awake at three a.m., she begged her memory for clarity - only to be betrayed by contradiction.

This hadn’t been love.

One moment, he had been sincere and caring; the next, cold and distant. She had constantly asked for clarity, and he had yelled at her for being a bother. She had spent weeks wondering whether any of it had ever been real.
The truth was clearer now: it hadn’t.

The discard hadn’t just been an ending - it had been an erasure of something that had never existed.
As if she had never mattered.
As if the emotions, the loyalty, the ties - none of it had held any weight.
It was a brutal kind of ghosting, where the person was still alive, but the version of them she had known no longer existed - and maybe, heart shattering, never had.

The hardest part hadn’t been the rejection.
It had been the rewriting of the story.

The love, or what she had thought was love, was now painted with suspicion. His playfulness with her friends felt manipulative in retrospect. Their closeness seemed performative, hollow.

And still, Her heart protested, holding onto fragments, hoping for an explanation that would make the pain make sense.

But the silence didn’t bring answers.
It brought space - for doubt, for grief, for anger.
It gave her time to question herself.

Was she not enough?
Was she asking too much?
Had she missed something?

She shrank, replaying the moments where she had opened herself completely, now feeling exposed - foolish and discarded, like she had been nothing more than a temporary thrill.

Yet in that unbearable silence, something began to shift.

Slowly. Painfully.
She began to understand that his disappearance said more about him than it ever could about her.
That woman he had once claimed to hate was now plastered across his screen in love.

She realised that the way he had exited her life - without empathy or respect, telling friends before telling her - was a reflection of his emotional limitations, not her worth.

One day, she would learn to stop chasing answers.
She would learn that closure wasn’t always something given, especially when the respect she had believed in had been imagined.

She would grieve the loss of the dream, the imagined future, and the version of herself that had been safe and happy in that world. She would grieve the friends who hadn’t spoken up when they should have.

And in the quiet aftermath, something soft began to emerge - her voice.

The voice that had been drowned out by doubt, silenced by confusion.
She began to reclaim it.
She started honouring her truth - not the distorted one shaped by someone else’s silence, but the one rooted in resilience.

She began to rebuild, not because the pain was gone, but because she deserved to heal.

And someday, that silence - the one that had once echoed so loudly it shattered her - would become something else.

A reminder.

Not of what she had lost,

but of what she had survived.