Wabi Sabi Papi
There is a certain romance to suffocation.
It starts like the first time you hold your breath underwater—a mix of thrill and trust, daring yourself to stay just a second longer. In the beginning, it feels almost poetic—two people so tightly entwined that they can no longer breathe without the other.
For years you can't imagine doing anything without him; even leaving the house feels impossible on your own. You tell yourself this is love, that needing him so much means you were meant to be together. But the truth is simpler and a little sadder: you were afraid of the world, and even more afraid of facing it by yourself even if codependency is a beautiful and lethal snare you're too in love to acknowledge.
Slowly, agoraphobia takes hold, not as a sudden shock but as a creeping reality. It’s only after months of couples therapy that you realize you aren't even breathing for yourself anymore, you're suffocating in tandem.
The divorce is a slow, merciless kind of alchemy, forming the parts of you that were scared and dependent into something else entirely. It’s as fun as being shoved off a cliff with no parachute. You hit rock bottom, sure, but then something weird happens: you realize you aren’t dead.
You're no longer a flat, two-dimensional version of yourself, defined by your role in someone else’s life. You’ve become three-dimensional—complex, layered, alive. Every emotion—joy, pain, fear, love—all of it is more vivid, more real. You’re free to explore, to risk, to find out who you are when you’re not suffocating under the weight of someone else’s expectations.
There is a certain intrigue to dissolution.
When things fall apart, you’re left with the raw material of yourself; all the ugly, imperfect details you ignored are now more pronounced. You don’t try to hide them anymore. Instead, you let the light catch them, watch them shimmer and reflect, until you see that the fractures aren’t flaws.
You learn to trace the cracks with your fingers, letting them guide you to something new. You start to feel the weight of your own presence, the way the silence holds you. The quiet is no longer a void to be filled but a canvas, where the cracks are not wounds but windows, and the room you're standing in starts to feel like it could be yours.
