An Unsent Letter, Finally Laid Bare

You will never truly read this. Perhaps your eyes will glide over these words, but they will not pierce you. They will not touch the soft, hollow place where a heart should be.

You were always like that—gliding instead of arriving, touching instead of staying, looking instead of seeing.

I write this from the black pit where you left me, a place so deep the sun has forgotten its name. The air here is thick and tastes of metal; the silence is so sharp it splits my skin. I sit here on a floor made of our shattered days, my hands raw from trying to gather the pieces.

This is not a love letter. There is no love left in me for you. What remains is a ruin shaped like your name, a howl trapped inside a throat, a wound that learned to speak.

I remember when you called me your home. You said it so easily, as if homes were meant to be temporary, as if belonging was just another lie to keep me soft. You touched me with the certainty of a thief claiming what was never his. Your breath in the dark felt like a promise until the morning proved otherwise.

And I believed you. God, I believed you.

Even when your laughter turned brittle as frost. Even when your hands grew careful and cold. Even when your eyes began to slide off me like water on glass.

I shrank myself quiet. Made myself small and still. I learned to hold my breath so you wouldn’t notice how much space my grief was taking.

But you had already left.

You left in quiet ways first; in the way you curled yourself around your phone instead of me, in the way you spoke to strangers in the voice you once saved for me, in the way your fingers grew restless and foreign even as they lay on my skin.

And then, one day, you vanished all at once—a tide receding without apology.

It would have hurt less if you’d simply said it: I have found another shore. But instead you wrapped your betrayal in silence, dressed it up as kindness, let me believe it was my fault for bleeding under your knives.

You wore your treason elegantly—like a well-tailored suit—and I only came to know its shape from the stories whispered by others. The ones who came before me. The ones who came after.

You betrayed me with the same precision you betrayed them. The same rehearsed softness, the same quiet departure, the same words that sounded like love but tasted of ash.

You are a pattern written in other people’s scars. A storm that arrives wearing another man’s name.

And still I thought I could be different.

You made me believe I was your cathedral; but I was only a hotel room, something to rest in for a night and then abandon without turning back.

Now here I sit, inside the ruins you left behind. The air here is thick with your absence. The mirrors refuse to hold my reflection. Even my own hands seem to belong to someone else.

You moved on easily, didn’t you? Laughed again. Slept again. Ran toward other bodies with the same hungry grace. While I stayed here, trying to claw your name out of my chest, drowning in a grief that refuses to loosen its teeth.

I hate you for that.

I hate the way you taught me how to beg without sound. How you left me stained with you. How you made me watch you become a stranger while still calling me by the same sweet names.

You once promised me eternity. And though you never meant it, I am still keeping my half of the promise—drowning here, in the shadow of what you left behind.

If you ever remember me—if you even dare—I hope you understand: you were not simply the one who left.

You were the one who betrayed me, who taught me how even tenderness can cut, who showed me that even love can be a blade pressed between ribs.

You were the wound that never learned how to close.

And now, even as I hear the stories of the others—the ones who came before me, and the ones who came after—I see the same scars you carved into them. The same quiet treason, the same quiet exit.

I should have known.

You were never mine to lose.

You were simply practicing on me what you had already mastered long before.

And though I once prayed you would find your way back to something good, something whole—I see now the truth, and it is colder than even you:

You will never change.

Not for me. Not for them. Not for anyone.

You were born a storm, and you will die a storm—cruel, destructive, and alone.

Jakarta, May 19th 2020

a requiem of what was never meant to be spoken