This morning, memories of a bygone era popped up on my phone: a notification from Daylio.
It read:
New Memories
1 year ago
A year. Only a year, yet it yawns like a chasm between then and now. The photo, him. A little ways off in the distance, walking down the track. We had gone on a proper hike for the very first time together (or maybe the second?), and it was one of the very few positive memories I made with him during a year in a dark shadow. Back then, I clung to mood tracking like a lifeline, desperate to remember feeling anything amidst the numbness.
Recalling things was never difficult for me, but during all the trials and strange tensions of things I don’t care to look back on, I was so traumatised that memories faded into the brain fog. So, it was almost a necessity to journal even the ugliness. This notification was more than a nostalgic nudge; it was a rusty scalpel reopening old wounds. I completely stopped tracking my mood last October because I had no need for it anymore. But why did I start?
November 2023. A psychologist’s office. The DASS-21 was a sterile questionnaire that felt utterly detached from the chaos within me. So, it came as a bit of a shock when she said that my results were quite alarming. My depression and anxiety were both rated as extremely severe, and my stress level was rated moderate. But it was only in February of the next year that I began journaling my mood. I wanted to get better, and that meant confronting it all.
Re-reading those entries was like peering into the eyes of a stranger, a younger self drowning in a sea of pain. Paranoia clung to her like a second skin. Anxiety coiled in her throat, a silent scream. Despair was her constant companion, and apathy, a chilling shroud that sat on top of her. Yet, with a detached clarity that both chills and saddens me, I agree with her assessment.
She was drowning and utterly alone, not realising how bad things had gotten. She never told anyone about her DASS, not even him. She shielded him from the truth, convinced he’d either crumble into self-pity or, worse, use it as an excuse to leave. She bore the weight of his neglect, his casual abandonment, his thousand tiny cruelties, and called it love.
She twisted her own arm believing his words. You’re hard to be around. Too distrustful. Even as he systematically chipped away at the trust she’d placed in him. She questioned her own sanity, convinced she was the architect of their crumbling world. She apologised for existing, for not being perfect and, heck, for the unforgivable sin of caring. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, and it paints a sullen portrait of my self-inflicted delusion.
It hurt to re-read those journal entries. There were countless entries just saying the same thing. I miss him. She just wanted to spend time with him, and even that was too hard for him to bear. And don’t get me started on the entries about the other woman. Because they exceeded her laments of wanting just a little time. I was reminded of betrayals that even I had forgotten.
For the longest time, I gaslit myself. I crashed out so much in these entries, spiralling into oblivion. And if I were just some random person reading this diary, I would have agreed that she appeared insane, and paranoid, and distrustful. But the thing is, she was right more often than she was wrong. It broke my heart to think about how she was harmed and how stupid and pitiful she was to keep enduring the heartache. Because if it were anyone else, I would have told them to leave.
I hate remembering the abandonment. My body remembers the air-starved in my lungs, the crushing isolation, the feeling of being a ghost in my own life. Among the many things he said, he forced me into a break of sorts—convenient since he was going overseas for a month, and I had no space to disagree. But guess who he kept messaging during his time overseas, when he had completely forgotten about me? The other woman. Carlotta, the modern-day Carmen.
I was violated over and over. And he got frustrated over why I was so distrustful of him. I remember stumbling upon the messages, a digital trail that unfortunately confirmed the story I had been telling myself. The casual “sorry, am I messaging too late?” from her, and the reassuring “not at all” from him, repeated over and over… it felt like a code I wasn’t meant to crack.
Suddenly, his trip abroad didn’t seem like it was just about sightseeing and celebrating the completion of his university days. They were punctuated by these secret exchanges. And the question lingered, how much of what I see is real—how much was hidden in the quiet pings of his phone, and how much was all in my head? It wasn’t just the content of the messages but the sheer volume, the frequency, and the ease of their connection. The echo of how we began.
I found myself staring at a string of conversations, each one a tiny stab of doubt. “Is it really necessary to talk this much?” I asked as the question echoed in the silence of my own unanswered anxieties. He tried to accommodate by cutting back on his messages to her, but it didn’t change the fact that he thought about her so much. And I tried to reconcile his professed exhaustion with the seemingly boundless energy he poured into her, the hours he spent weaving connections with her while I subsisted on breadcrumbs of a “how are you?” every so often, if I was lucky.
What did she offer that I didn’t? And why did I desire a man who so casually, so consistently, relegated me to the periphery of his existence? When he seemingly went out of his way to psychologically harm me? Maybe I was a little crazy for that. And perhaps, in her own way, that girl from a year ago was as lost as I was.
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