They’re really saying “I love you”
Monday, June 15, 2026 8:41 PM PST
Berkeley, CA
Greetings from the evening hours in my new apartment in Berkeley, California. It is mostly empty and there’s no WiFi yet, so this blog may be uploaded from my desk at work tomorrow morning or not for a couple days. I do need Internet eventually but I don’t mind it too much for now. It’s rather peaceful to come home and truly relax, but I am also feeling quite lonely to be honest because it’s a three-bedroom apartment occupied by just one person (me!) whose not-even-boyfriend broke up with them yesterday.
I have a couple of ideas why he sent me a very brief but clear text that he was done and I wouldn’t be hearing from him again, even though he didn’t actually spare me any details. A big reason is definitely the long-distance situation while I intern at LBNL for the next three months (blog post forthcoming!!) but there’s mental health struggles, family and job stress, and different stages of life involved. We wanted the same things in the end but couldn’t get to them together.
As usual, when I write these kinds of blogs, the details of the event aren’t the focus but the lessons imparted from them. This is especially true for such a personal subject; I really don’t want to hurt his feelings just because I’m still hurt, on the off chance he’s reading this and realizes it’s about him, which is just so unfair. So there won’t be any juicy details. I’m sorry if you’re disappointed.
We ended on okay terms, all things considered. There was no shouting match both because he didn’t let me have it and I was so shocked that I didn’t even know what to say. “F— you, I hate your guts”? I was definitely angry at one point, because of how and when he did it, but people are allowed to break up with you when they no longer want to pursue a connection for whatever reason so I’m not too upset about that.
I sent him one logical and nice message asking why, trying to process the initial shock. He may have actually replied to that one had I not followed up 15 minutes later with a much longer, messier list of reasons why his text came as such a surprise to me from where we left things Friday night. Curse words were involved when my brain wanted to fill in the gaps. Finally, I remembered I gave him a book on Friday and impulsively decided I wanted it back because I never got to read it. I even said “I know I will regret saying this” but actually I don’t at all. This is my first real breakup (even though we were never officially dating) and in popular culture, I always hear of the “drunk midnight text” with your ex. Everything I told him was true—he did break up with me after doing X, Y and Z, and I felt (reasonably, I think?) betrayed. It’s reasonable that I wanted him to understand what I was going through, the same day I moved away from all my family and friends for the next 3.333 months, but it wouldn’t have helped or changed anything.
What actually helps is typing out what I would say, absolutely everything, the anger and sadness and even shameless begging (we’ve all been there!), and then just not sending it to him at the end. I get all the catharsis and none of the consequences! It’s easier than it sounds. It also helps to remember all of my friends hate him now…versus just some of them when we were together…so even if we reconciled I know they’d refuse to look him in the eye. Could I really be in a serious relationship with someone who I could never bring to any party, or even talk about, again? It’s a bad sign if no one likes your partner except you—that’s a sign you need a new partner or new friends, and I know my friends aren’t the problem here.
And in my head, I have begun to glorify the “before times” back when we were together, being April and the second half of May till yesterday. The smile I would get when his name popped up on my phone or when he would send me these strings of dumb Instagram reels that gave me a little glimpse into his head. It’s so easy to glorify this but I have to remember that I slowly became someone different then. My grades were not as great this quarter because I was clearly distracted, though honestly I hated particle symmetries anyway. One relationship particularly became very strained because she could tell that I changed, and not for the better. This just means that I need to do some more growing before I enter another person’s life. I’m sure that I will date again somewhat soon but I can’t right now, and the best part is that there’s no rush in life. One day at a time.
I also painted a rosier picture of who he was to my friends and parents so that I could simultaneously convince myself that I can be with him, even though I knew internally that a few things about him didn’t agree with me. Nothing horrible, but we don’t have nearly the same communication style, he engages in things I abstain from completely to a point I’m not comfortable with, and honestly our priorities are just not aligned. He wants what I have but I grew up with financial privilege he may never come close to, and that’s just reality. I would move on and I know he feels stuck where he is. I started writing a blog about that gap actually, which I may still finish now but from an obviously different angle. I write a lot of blogs that never see the light of GitHub Pages.
Also, I have seen him everywhere here. Not literally of course, but not even two hours after we ended things my dad and I were driving into Berkeley, past a “Nick’s Sourdough” not even a mile away from my apartment. I actually laughed out loud and snapped a picture for my friends. Who knows, I may go one day, the Google reviews are really good. And he really loves this city, which he’d talk about even before we got together when he found out I was temporarily moving, and there’s colleagues too. What a predicament.
I will never regret loving another human being especially not someone as wonderful as him. I even told him this once and I think he thought I’m a little crazy, but I don’t mind being upset or in pain. Obviously it’s not preferred and trust me, right now I do not want to be missing him so much. I want to move on and have my hot girl summer. But I chalk this up to just another one of life’s experiences. It is such a gift to be able to feel so strongly, and I’d never been so sure about someone in my life. I didn’t even know I loved this boy or how strong there was a voice in my head saying to stick with him until he was gone. That doesn’t mean that what I felt wasn’t real or true, it’s just no longer valid.
Ultimately I’m still accepting that I will never really know why it ended. Even if I send him all the angry texts in the world, I know he’s not going to reply to any of them. I could beg for him back and it would make no difference if he doesn’t want to return. Don’t chase people by the way, you’re above that. Your whole happiness about the big, wide world does not rest on just one person.
The finality of it bothers me the most I think, especially when understanding that I will never talk to this person again. We always lived in different cities, even more true now that I’m 800 miles away, and our lives are not intertwined anymore at all. The rest of my life will be without him. Of course, right now I would love nothing more than for him to tell me that he’s sorry, that we should get back together, but I know that this feeling will pass. And logically I no longer want him back. We could never be just friends either, because I would always yearn for what we had and he wants us to be done entirely.
It’s hard for us humans to accept the concept of an end because I think we think we will love forever. So deaths, divorces, moving houses hurts us more than birthdays and weddings because we can never turn back the clock. But in three words, to quote the great Robert Frost, I can sum up everything I have learned about life: it goes on.
I told my friends slowly the news and that I don’t want to talk about it, but I love them very much and will see them soon. Thus incurred the flood of “we’re here for you Akhila”, “you don’t need that boy anyway”, “you’re better than him.” I felt very loved when I needed it most, although I don’t want to think that I’m better than him because this just is an instance of your brain wanting to be avoidant: I want to avoid the truth by convincing myself that what we had wasn’t really that good. But for me anyway it was that good. Maybe my life is worse without him, and only time will tell but I’ll never really know because we will most likely never have the version of events where we got married and had kids and stayed together forever. So yeah, things are allowed to suck! This sucks!
I have had willpower of steel to not contact him again this week. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve tried to convince my brain every which way that it would be a good idea. But what am I actually looking for in those moments? It’s not really for him back. He showed me how he can really be and I don’t want that anymore. But we all avoid pain. Our brains are cowards and would rather keep us happy and stable than dysregulated and heartbroken. I am trying to avoid my real feelings and maintain hope that we can restore the status quo that was already shattered the second he told me he doesn’t want to do this anymore.
Moreover, currently I feel like I’m in the right here—I really believe this breakup was not about me in the slightest but that he’s not financially or mentally in a place where he can give me the love and attention I’m looking for. He told me as much in the text too, to never forget how lovely I am. (I won’t. ;)) But if I stepped over his firm boundary that he wants space only to appease my uncomfortable emotions that I know will go away in time then, well, I’m already struggling to forgive him. I don’t want to be in that limbo with myself too.
I am so privileged to have so many loving relationships with my friends, my family, and my colleagues/classmates, but I’m not polyamorous so I only had one romantic relationship. There was a bond that was saved just for him. I guess you could call that grief, in a way, that has to be processed and felt properly. I had movies to show him and poetry to read him and songs to sing for him and now I can only enjoy them alone and raise a glass to my memories, believing that in his new world without me, he’s doing the same too. This reminds me of a great book, The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, that has a very similar quote I must have repurposed in my brain somehow and an even better one I’ve just found again:
“To fall in love with the world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering, both human or otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry and watch the sycamore trees leaf out in June. When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect with irony or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.”
Now I’m wishing I gave him this book. He would have loved it. He’ll just have to find it on his own. Here’s another quote I resonate with strongly:
“You can’t see the future coming–not the terrors, for sure, but you also can’t see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.”
To this end, it helps to think that I’m definitely not alone in this; I am the millionth person to see the end of a relationship. Adele has written entire albums about this shit. Noah Kahan’s “The Great Divide” summarizes a lot of my feelings, although I’m still annoyed at the guy for accidentally stealing my album name of five years. I can never use it again because everyone will think that I directly plagiarized from Noah Kahan when that’s not true; I actually directly plagiarized from Gregory Alan Isakov.
I think about him all the time, and my deep misunderstanding of his life. But I’m still on his side and I’ll always root for him in my head. “I hope you settle down, I hope you marry rich, I hope you’re scared of all the ordinary shit. Like murderers and ghouls and cancer on your skin, but not your soul, and what he might do with it…”
I’m currently listening to Doors by Noah Kahan and I just remembered how we all share the human experience, to love and be loved. Sometimes I have these moments of pure calmness and appreciation for the world, where all my worries for just a split second disappear and what’s left is filled with what I can only describe as the love of God. (Welcome to the Universe stans will recall that I don’t actually believe in God, but I like calling back to religious phrases quite regularly. It helps.) But 20 years down the line maybe we’ll look each other up and I worry that mine will tell my whole story, hopefully of being a professor and settling down somewhere, and his will disappear among the hundreds of people who share his name.
I reconsidered writing this blog right now because I only got dumped yesterday. The messages and lessons I have now are likely very different and way more emotionally charged than they will be once I have fully moved on in a few more days. But maybe that’s even more reason: life is chaotic and beautiful and senseless and painful. Represent it as it is right when it happens. No shame, no regrets.
I am incredibly sensitive and insecure. I overthink everything. And I am open about these things while also being open about the good things. I inherently believe that I am smart and kind and funny and hardworking and passionate. So many people have so much love for me, and I’m a fighter. So whenever the world tries to tell me that I’m not, it only bothers me on the surface level. But on the inside I am secure. And the sensitivity is a sign that I feel very deeply, which I will never be sad about. Isn’t it so interesting how all these things come together in one person?
I actually said something very similar 6 months ago in a blog post, right after a classmate I had a crush on rejected me: I’ll never meet anyone quite like him and no one else can quite compare.
They won’t. Here’s another ending we all hate. I have all of this knowledge about someone I probably will never speak to again. He is allergic to apples and pears, but just the skin. He loves goth music and fixing antiques and old cars. There’s other, sadder, things too, because sharing love comes with sharing pain too. I thought we were just perfectly different and just perfectly the same, because we agreed on the things that matter and had these long text wall fights about the little things that didn’t. I’ll never meet anyone quite like him and no one else can quite compare to him. But it would be weird if they did!
I am sure I’ll meet someone who does love me again, and maybe it will work out, or it won’t. I didn’t even know my now-ex existed back then, and I wouldn’t for over three more months. What we shared was special and loving: the inside jokes and phrases, the driving around and reading him poetry and yapping his head off about something dumb. I miss that and want that again and all I can do about it is hope it will come by again. And when it does? I will love them with the same intensity and affliction.
No regrets. Never regret loving another human being. It is the beauty of being alive, that you have these fleeting moments and meet such wonderful people. I don’t think I can put what I feel right now into words, all the hope and pain and melancholy and absolute yearning. Let’s just say that I understand what it must be like to be a poet.
Greetings from Friday morning Akhila who finally has the WiFi needed to upload this blog. It’s interesting to see how my feelings have evolved over this week. Sunday and Monday were really quite rough, Tuesday was just a bit better, but Wednesday saw some real progress and yesterday was pretty much back to normal. My internship has been a great distraction and I often find that I cry at the end of the day because of the pent-up emotions, which is how I’ve always been so I’m not bothered, and the time has definitely reduced exponentially as the days go on. I wasn’t going to add anything to this post, but I think it may help a reader to know that it always gets better and you must always have hope.
I don’t think that I will ever really forget him. My granddad died suddenly around three years ago, and at the time, it was hard to see how I’d ever move past it and the encompassing pain that his passing left me. I still miss him sometimes, but I have grown around it. I will grow around this too… and already have.
That’s another interesting point. We all know that we’re changing all the time, but usually in hindsight. I look back at who I was at 15, 17, 18, even March 2026 me, and often don’t recognize my own memory of myself. But I know right now that this experience has changed who I am and who I will be and the change is still happening. I distinctly knew as soon as we started dating again that I changed the course of the rest of my life, though I didn’t yet understand how.
Sometimes I thought-spiral like that actually, wondering about how there could be infinite parallel universes because every single action and thought is a conscious choice compared to the infinitely many possible alternatives. The last month could have been so different than it turned out, so it’s hard for me to believe in destiny or fate. This may have to be another blog post, though, because this one’s already quite long.
Cheers to living and loving, Akhila
I also will upload a blog post I had taken down, about the same boy back when we were not dating for a couple weeks. Looking back on it I wonder who that writer was. There’s so much I didn’t know then, about what the future held and who I would turn out to be. Greetings to 2027 Akhila who probably feels the same way about the me right now.
Reading: Not a whole lot, I must say, but there’s “107 Days” by Kamala Harris which I started reading over Memorial Day break and am about to get back to. Then I got a Berkeley Public Library card on Tuesday, which was so easy! I am going to finally get through “The Abundance” by Annie Dillard, and also read “The Deportation Express: A History of America Through Forced Removal” by Ethan Blue and “My Education” by Susan Choi.
Listening: I really really love “Flood” by Dua Saleh ft. Bon Iver, “Mary On a Cross” by Ghost, and “OMG” by Phoneboy. Not a ton of jazz going on, partly because we both loved Ella and I’m trying to limit the reminders. But she’ll come back soon enough. Also some Toby Keith, some Red Clay Strays, and Maxwell’s Silver Hammer on Abbey Road—I’ve never experienced a story in song like the Beatles have created.
I’m going to see Gregory Alan Isakov, my absolute favorite artist, live with the San Francisco Symphony in just under 3 months. It’s great to have things to look forward to.
Watching: I have been rewatching both Young Sheldon and After Life. The latter has become too sad and love-y for me right now, the former is still funny and wonderful. But I am actively looking for new shows and movies! Email me if you wish.