growing pains

I used to think heartbreak was losing a guy.

I was wrong.

The deepest pain is when your own child disappoints you. Nothing cuts deeper, because no one else lives in your heart the way your child does. They carry your love, your hopes, your prayers, and all the dreams you had for them before they even knew what those dreams were.

So when they make choices that break your heart, turn away from what you taught them, or become someone you barely recognise, the pain is different. It is heavier. It is not just hurt for what is, but grief for what could have been.

This is not ordinary heartbreak. This is love bruised to the bone. This is grief with their name on it.

And the hardest part is that you still love them through all of it. You do not stop loving your child because they broke your heart. You just keep hurting, keep hoping, and keep praying they find their way back.

suddenly thirteen

Her room still carries traces of childhood: a dollhouse sits beside her Lego box, stuffed animals lining the shelf, the fresh scent of strawberry shampoo after her shower. You braid her hair and finish it with ribbons to match her outfit.

Then she turns thirteen. There is no warning. The change comes all at once. Yesterday she was role-playing with her toys and making stop-motion videos with her little sister. Today, she stands at Mecca, asking for lip gloss and press-on nails, studying her reflection as though the way she looks has suddenly begun to matter.

Childhood recedes like the tide. Loose hair and claw clips replace the neat plaits of younger years. For school, sleek ponytails. On weekends, her long, straight hair is carefully parted, falling exactly the way she likes it. Her dresser stacks with the things you never expected to see so soon: tiny perfume bottles, an eyelash curler, and skincare products she learned about from friends.

Her sense of style changes too. The pretty dresses that once filled her wardrobe are pushed to the back, making space for denim shorts, trendy activewear sets and oversized hoodies, birthday gifts she expertly persuaded her doting uncles to buy.

Children are always eager to grow up. They hurry toward the next phase of life, certain that older must mean better. Meanwhile, you find yourself wishing she would slow down just a little, so that princess costumes and tiaras, unicorns, braids, and ribbons might last a bit longer.

People warn you about sleepless nights with babies, the chaos of the toddler stage, and the rush of school schedules. But no one prepares you for the emotional whiplash of watching twelve turn thirteen.

The shift feels almost overnight.

One day, you are curling her hair. The next, she’s dabbing blush onto her cheeks, pushing against the no-makeup rule. Somewhere along the way, your little girl stepped quietly into adolescence.

blank space

There are some people you miss because they left a space where an ending should have been. This is a quick epilogue to the first-heartbreak chapter, because I never leave a story incomplete.

A few years later, that boy came back into my life without an explanation for his disappearance. The closest thing to a reason came wrapped in practicality: he wanted to focus on his last year of high school and avoid distractions. As if vanishing was a productivity hack. I half believed him, the way you let a bandage pretend it’s stitches. I wanted a noble reason more than the truth. Any excuse can feel like relief when you’ve been living on questions.

I expected his comeback to cure the ache. I pictured it sliding into place like a false tooth, covering the raw nerve. When he returned, my body stayed braced. My mind didn’t celebrate. My heart didn’t open. The old silence sat between us like a bruise you don’t poke. Bitterness rose first, then something darker, close to vengeance. Teenage me had wanted an answer to “Where did you go?” Adult me wanted acknowledgement of the crater he left behind. The adolescent burn cooled into something defensive. I could hold a grudge like a Taylor Swift song.

He acted like we could restart without touching the rupture, and he assumed my heart would forget what it had learned. But I couldn’t. The gap taught me what erasure feels like. So we didn’t get back together, because I resented him more than I missed him.  

And maybe that’s the real closure: not the lost explanation, or a happy ending that mends a broken heart, but the fact that my life moved on, and the strange realisation that the door I’d been staring at was never the only way forward.

ankle deep in yearning

There’s one particular scene in the latest “Wuthering Heights” that stirred an unexpected sadness in me. I didn’t understand why until I pulled it apart.

It’s during Catherine’s fever spiral. She’s lovesick in bed, the room blurring as time folds in on itself. In her delirium, the boy Heathcliff appears; then his hand reaches from under the bed and holds her ankle. The moment strikes like memory in muscle. She doesn’t look down, but her skin recognises him, as if childhood has returned to comfort her.

Under his grip, her body unclenches: I’m here. I’ve always been here. The film carries their history without words. The past arrives through contact, and it grabs hold. Their story runs on yearning: the hunger to belong, to be seen by the person who knew you before you outgrew yourself. Beneath the romance, there’s protection, too: the flashback of him shielding her from her father’s violence. The gesture becomes shelter: Stay with me. I’ve got you. As she slips away, her mind reaches for the first safe place it ever learned to trust.

That’s when it hit me. I know that yearning. At seventeen, I was infatuated with a former boyfriend. I replayed our conversations like a broken record, trying to track down the part where he stopped wanting me. I told myself it was love, because what else do you call a feeling that consumes your whole body?

One day I was still in his world. The next he blocked me, erasing us with a click. The silence left blank space instead of closure. I kept pining for him the way a tongue keeps checking a missing tooth, resisting the clean finality of absence.

So when Catherine reacts to that hand on her ankle, I notice the cycle: the brain clings to what once felt good and keeps wondering, Where did you go? The wound stays open, so the search continues.

That’s the heartbreak: a hand around an ankle. As her body begins to give way, the film strips their tether back to instinct: reflex, nerve, something older than choice. Attachment refuses to let go. It keeps asking for the answer it never got.