Today, i wore my “after-breakup” outfit.
This morning, as I prepared myself for work, I reached for my pink jacket—the same one I bought last September. I slung a familiar bag over my shoulder, its gradient pink hue unchanged from the day I first carried it. And when I reached for my perfume, I realized I had run out of my usual scent. Without thinking, I grabbed the cherry perfume I bought last November.
And just like that, I was back there.
Back to the days when breathing felt heavy, when I clung to anything that smelled sweet because my lungs were filled with the bitterness of grief. Back to when I wrapped myself in bright colors, hoping they would disguise the greyscale of my gaze. Back to when every step felt like dragging a body too exhausted to carry itself.
This was my after-breakup outfit. My heartbroken armor.
It triggered something deep in me, but I didn’t put the jacket away. I didn’t reach for another scent. Instead, I let myself wear it all again—the jacket, the bag, the perfume, the past. And for a cherry on top, I played my old broken-hearted playlist, the same songs that once felt like open wounds, lyrics I once sobbed into my pillow.
I even stepped into the same shoes I wore months ago, when I was shattered into pieces.
But something had changed.
The armor still fit, and it still felt right, but not in the same way it once did. It was familiar, yet now I saw it with a new perspective—one that made me realize I no longer needed it the way I used to. Like wearing an old teenage outfit, comforting yet distant, as if it belonged to a version of me I had already outgrown.
And that’s when I realized—there was no war anymore.
For months, I believed I was in a battle. Every day felt like a fight for survival, a struggle to get through the hours without collapsing under the weight of grief. I woke up each morning, bracing for another war, another day of keeping myself together, another night of exhaustion. I thought that if I fought hard enough, if I endured long enough, I would eventually win. That one day, I would stand victorious, free from the sorrow that clung to me like a second skin.
But there was no victory. No final battle.
Because there was no battlefield to begin with.
Grief was never an enemy. It was never something to be fought or conquered. The war I imagined was one I created myself, thinking that healing meant defeating the pain. But grief does not fight back. It does not resist. It only exists. And I had spent all this time throwing punches at the air, trying to overcome something that was never meant to be an opponent.
I am still grieving, yes. But grief is not an enemy to be fought. It is not a war to be won.
It is a companion to be understood. A presence to be embraced.
And so I walked out the door, still carrying my old armor. Not because I needed it. Not because I was still at war.
But because it no longer felt like armor at all.
Just another part of me—like my jacket, my perfume, my past. A story I once lived, now folded into the fabric of who I am.
