The pain of Jazmin

 Jazmin sat by the window, her cup of tea long gone cold. Outside, rain tapped gently against the glass softly, relentlessly, and cruelly familiar. The sky, like her heart, hadn’t seen sunlight in days. He had left on a day like this. Not with shouting or slammed doors, but with a bag in one hand and his silence in the other. The rain had blurred the view as he walked away, but she hadn’t needed to see. She had felt it. He never turned back, even when she cried out his name. Every step of him leaving echoed in her bones.

It wasn’t one mistake that drove him away, it was a thousand small ones. The way she’d stopped listening. The sharpness in her words. To ease her own stress, she had spent more time with her friends than her relationship. The walls she built when she should have built bridges. Love doesn’t often vanish all at once; it erodes, silently and with time. By the time Jazmin noticed, it was already mostly gone.

She spent months in grief, not the dramatic kind others noticed, but the quiet, consuming sort that lives in dishes left unwashed, in music left unplayed. She grew older in those months. Grief has a way of doing that. Making clocks run faster while days feel slower. And the loneliness was different now. It wasn’t just absence, it was regret. She missed his laugh, yes. But more than that, she missed who she had been with him. Someone soft. Someone trying. Someone brave enough to be loved and to love back without armor.

Sometimes, she spoke aloud into the silence of their shared apartment, pretending he still lived there.

“I didn’t know how much I was hurting you,” she whispered one night, curled on the couch where he used to nap with the television watching him. “I thought we had time. I thought love would hold.”

But love, she had learned, isn’t a safety net. It’s a fire you tend every day, or it slowly burns out.

Still, life did not stop moving. And neither could she.

She started taking walks in the rain, even though it hurt. She needed to stop flinching every time the sky turned gray. With each walk, she let herself remember. Let herself ache. Let herself heal, not by forgetting, but by moving through the pain.

One evening, drenched and breathless, she stood by the old café they used to visit. Inside, the smell of cinnamon and coffee drifted out. She smiled faintly. Her reflection in the window looked older now, sadder too—but steadier.

Jazmin knew she might never see him again. That the love of her life had walked away, and she had let him, and perhaps he had been right to go. But she also knew something else now.

She was still here.

And rain or not, she would not let the past be the only thing she lived with.

So she stepped inside the café, shook the rain from her coat, and for the first time in a long while, ordered two coffees, one for her, and one for the hope of someone new.

Just in case.