Some wounds don’t bleed.
They bruise quietly, deep inside, where no one thinks to look.
One moment, you are loved.
Or at least, you believe you are.
The next, you’re lying on the road of your own life, stunned, asking yourself what just happened—and whether anyone will come back to check if you’re still alive.
Some people exit lives the way they exit lanes. No slowing down. No looking back. No acknowledgement of impact. They take what they needed—your care, your patience, your emotional labour, your belief in them—and disappear. And you’re left behind holding the wreckage, trying to remember how to breathe.
What hurts the most is not that they left.
It’s how they left.
No conversation.
No accountability.
No, “I see what this has done to you.”
Just silence. Or worse—casualness. As if the connection meant far less than it actually did. As if your heart was a temporary shelter, they stayed in until they found better weather.
You begin to question yourself in ways that feel humiliating.
Was I too available?
Too patient?
Too forgiving?
Too invested?
You shrink your own goodness to make their exit make sense.
Because surely, if you were worthy, they would have stayed. Surely, if it meant what they said it meant, they wouldn’t have vanished so cleanly.
But nobody tells you how disorienting it is to grieve someone who is still alive. Someone who once knew your softest fears and now treats you like a chapter they skimmed.
No one sees the nights when you sit with unanswered questions echoing in your mind. No one sees how your nervous system flinches at sudden silence. No one sees how carefully you begin to guard your softness.
This is where the grit begins.
Because after the shock wears off, survival kicks in. You wake up every day carrying unanswered questions and still manage to show up. You go to work with a composed face. You respond politely when your insides are screaming. You replay conversations, searching for clues, while the other person moves on untouched.
And slowly—without applause, without witnesses—you start rebuilding.
You learn that closure doesn’t always come from the person who broke you. Sometimes it comes from the moment you realise: someone who could leave this way was never capable of loving you the way you deserved.
You begin to see the truth that was obscured by hope. That consistency is love. That care leaves footprints. That people who value you don’t vanish when things get real.
Grace, in moments like these, is not forgiveness or positivity.
Grace is getting out of bed when your heart feels heavier than your body.
Grace is choosing not to harden, even when bitterness would be easier.
Grace is learning to trust yourself again after someone made you question your worth.
And grit?
Grit is staying.
Staying with the pain long enough to understand it.
Staying with yourself when someone else didn’t.
Staying soft in a world that rewards emotional hit-and-runs.
One day, you realise you didn’t just survive the accident—you became more aware, more discerning, more grounded. The scar remains, yes. But scars are proof of healing, not weakness.
To anyone who has been left without explanation, without decency, without care—please know this:
You were not disposable.
You were not forgettable.
You were not too much.
Some people don’t leave because you lack value.
They leave because they lack the capacity to stay.
And if no one ever came back to check on you—
Let this be the moment you check on yourself.
One day, without ceremony, you realise something steady inside you:
You survived.
You survived without the apology.
Without the explanation.
Without them coming back to check if you were okay.
And survival, in this context, is not small. It is sacred.
Because the most radical thing you can do after an emotional hit-and-run is this:
Stay soft.
Stay self-respecting.
Stay aware.
Let the scar remind you—not that you were foolish—but that you were brave enough to feel deeply in a world where many only know how to take.
To anyone who has been left mid-sentence, mid-trust, mid-dream:
You were not disposable.
You were simply encountered by someone who did not know how to carry what they asked for.
And that is not your shame to hold.
