11/12/25

It is very hot today, and in the morning, during my yoga practice, I cried again.

It wasn’t the kind of breakdown where you hurt so much that your brows knit together and you can’t stop sobbing. I was just sitting there cross-legged, eyes closed, doing nothing at all, and the tears simply kept falling, drop after drop.

I found myself revisiting all those moments of anxiety, anger, arguments, and separation between us.

Back then, I still really wanted us to open our hearts to each other and talk clearly about what had happened, to make sense of it together. I genuinely hoped we could sit down and have an honest conversation.

But he was already slowly pulling away.

He kept distancing himself while saying, “I love you very much. I’m stepping back now so I can have time to process this. I hope it will help us be better together.”

And then, just like that, he completely withdrew.

During vipassana, it wasn’t that I didn’t see or didn’t become aware of the problems in this relationship. I had set a condition for us: if one day we were ever to be together again, it would have to start from a completely new place. Both of us would have to be willing to really work on ourselves, to do deep reflection and self-inquiry, to genuinely, consciously, and wholeheartedly want to be together, and to be willing to turn all of that into real actions, and so on and so on.

But by then, he had already left emotionally.

On the surface, it looked like I was the one saying, “We should break up.”

But I know that, on a certain level, he was the one who had already gone first.

In that moment, there was also a voice inside me slowly taking shape:

Let him be.

Let him be who he is.

If he wants to leave, let him leave.

If he doesn’t want to face it, don’t force him.

If he is empty, let him be.

I have no right to interfere with someone else’s life, and I don’t have the power to control them either.

Yesterday, my flatmate’s girlfriend and a few of their friends were at home. They cooked this incredibly delicious fish and rice dish (arroz de peixe) and invited me to join them. Over the meal, one of his friends told me that there's a short story competition, and that yesterday just happened to be the deadline.

So when I woke up the next morning, I pulled out the very first short story I’d ever written, edited it again and again, translated it into Portuguese, and submitted it right before the deadline.

That story is about a toad.

I wrote it after an argument with Beans.

I was deeply hurt that time, so I poured that pain and anger into writing, and used the darker sides of Beans as material to shape the character in the story.

I remember that after Beans finished reading it, he said to me,“Shikin, your writing is really good. But I want to ask you something: deep down, do you actually think I’m the most disgusting, ugliest person in the world?”

Seeing him so upset, a heavy wave of guilt rose up in me immediately.

I told him, “No, he isn’t entirely you. I was really angry at that moment. And I’ve also written so many things about the beautiful parts of you, haven’t I? I love you, and so on and so on…”

Yesterday the weather was gloomy and grey.

After I submitted the piece, I felt completely drained, as if all my strength had been sucked out of me.

I sent the story to my therapist and asked her,“Am I actually really dark and full of hatred? Am I simply incapable of looking at the people who still cause me pain through the eyes of love?”

We’ll probably talk about this in next week’s session.

But I also reread my notes from our previous session, the very last line was my therapist saying to me,“Shikin, you need to think about where your anger and your pain can be directed.”

During one part of today’s yoga practice, we were just sitting.

I don’t know why, but images of the “love” between Beans and me started appearing one after another in my mind. I saw the joy we had together, our past tenderness, all those moments when we genuinely loved each other.

Then the images shifted into him withdrawing, shutting himself down, those promises quietly dissolving one by one; him pulling away from his love for me, from his gentleness, from my open heart, from the parts of me he had once seen and appreciated, from our plans, from our “future”.

All these things I had once attached myself to so deeply were suddenly gone.

There was a lot of discomfort, a huge emptiness and grief.

If you were to ask me now,“Do you still want to be with Beans?”

My answer would be: I don’t.

I know we had a lot, a lot of joy.

But I also know that he isn’t ready yet, and neither am I.

I know that I can’t truly trust him, and I will never do.

I know that when I’m with him, my emotions are constantly out of control, that I still have a very long road ahead of me, with many lessons to learn, many wounds to heal, and many things in myself that need tending to.

I also know that after seeing so many of these issues clearly, I genuinely no longer want to be connected to him in the form of a romantic relationship.

I think I still love him.

I am still deeply grateful for everything we experienced together, and I truly wish him happiness and peace.

At the same time, I am also very clear that the “me” from back then and the “him” from back then have already died.

Today in yoga, I just sat there quietly, eyes closed. When I watched the happy memories with Beans playing in my mind, I truly felt happy too; each time I revisited the painful ones, I felt so sad that my body trembled.

In the past, this feeling used to be 100% pure sadness.

But recently, it seems like a few new emotional notes have started to appear.

Now, within my sadness, besides

“I’m so sad, I’ve lost Beans and our love,”

there are also some new voices saying,

“This is actually a good thing. Think about it: what if you had only realised all of this five or ten years into the relationship?

If all those ‘dreams’ had really ‘come true,’ would they have been a beautiful dream, or a nightmare?”

But underneath all of those emotions and questions, I also genuinely, genuinely want to understand: what exactly is the relationship between love and attachment?

A few days ago, I asked ChatGPT,“The feelings between Beans and me, are they love, or attachment?”

It said a lot, but its conclusion was:

“You have a great deal of love for him, but at the same time you also have a very strong attachment. He likes you very much, but he may not yet know how to love, or may not currently have the capacity to love.”

My god.

I was honestly a bit shocked by my own ChatGPT.

Sometimes I write out my psychological reflections and send them to it, I even gave it a nickname, “Chad.”

And then it just “levelled up” like this and handed me that answer.

I do believe that Beans has love for me, it’s just that there are many obstacles inside him, which may be stopping that love from flowing freely.

I truly hope that one day he will be able to love fully.

Love, to me, is honestly one of the most important and most beautiful things in this world.

To be honest, looking back now, I really do feel that every step I took was the best decision I could have made at the time.

Even though every single step hurt as fuckkkkkkk.

1. I decided not to go to Dubai and Tashkent with him.

That was during the period right before we truly parted, when we were still deeply entangled, both physically and emotionally. If I had actually gone with him back then, maybe that brief sweetness would have lasted a little longer, but the cracks and conflicts that had already appeared would very likely have been magnified in a foreign land and turned into even deeper ruptures. Looking back now, this decision of “not going,” even though it broke my heart at the time, was quietly protecting me.

2. I decided to go to Belize on my own.

Belize is not really a place I loved; that “not liking it” probably has a lot to do with the state I was in. That period was almost the beginning of my daily, intense breakdowns. On some days, I would take nothing but a towel, a bottle of ice water, and a notebook, walk to the beach, put on my sunglasses, and lie on the sand crying by myself. I would cry until my hands started to go numb, and then I would force myself to return to the sensations in my body: to feel my breath, my skin, the ocean breeze, and slowly find a tiny bit of calm, before diving straight into the sea.

The water in Belize is very blue, very beautiful, and really very salty. During that time, I often asked myself, “Will my tears ever run dry one day?” After every breakdown, I kept hearing the same answer in my heart: it turns out I still have so many tears left to cry.

Besides crying, I was also trying to keep myself alive in the most literal sense: even though I had almost no appetite most of the time, I still forced myself to eat some delicious and cheap lobster; I got very close to many stingrays, watching them slide past me in the water; I went to dive the Blue Hole and went snorkelling, staring into those vast, silent, unfamiliar underwater worlds. Now when I think of Belize, these are almost all of my memories of it: pain, seawater, tears, the Blue Hole, and stingrays.

3. I decided to go back to Oaxaca on my own.

It was a solo return to an old place, back to the town where we had first felt, “This is our home.” I walked past the corners where we used to laugh and kiss, looked at the streets that felt both familiar and strange, and felt as if I were overlapping with a parallel world that had already disappeared. I couldn’t even bring myself to walk into the mercado where we used to buy our groceries. Once, Eve and her fiancé suggested going there for lunch, but when it came time to walk there, I realised I simply couldn’t move my feet in that direction. It was “so painful that I couldn’t step inside,” a kind of pain that truly felt like “heart-breaking” in the most literal way.

At the same time, Oaxaca also gave me a new kind of life.

I made new friends there, reunited with old ones, experienced Día de los Muertos, and allowed myself to be carried by a different rhythm. Later, my former landlords/friends, Gaby and Victor, told me that they had named the little house we used to live in “Shikin.” After I left, they would look at the art I had left behind and feel the traces of my life in that tiny space; they felt that my energy, my love, and my laughter were still there. It became a house filled entirely with “Shikin.” So they decided to call that little house “Shikin.”

For me back then, this was both bittersweet and tender: one home had disappeared, but somewhere in the world there was still a place that continued to remember me by name.

4. I decided to come to Brazil instead of going back to Argentina.

In Argentina, I have friends, places I can genuinely call “home,” a familiar support system, people who can hug me when I’m falling apart, street corners and cafés and spaces where I can easily come to shore. But in that emotional state, I chose to go to a completely new country, and it was also “his country.” It really was a decision that felt like cutting into my own heart, as if I were deliberately throwing myself into a space that was both unfamiliar and full of triggers.

And yet, it is precisely because I came to Brazil that I slowly gained a lot of clarity. I began to see myself more clearly, to see this relationship more clearly, to see what I truly want. Here, I’ve met a few new, deeply inspiring friends with whom I feel strongly connected. Maybe this is the universe quietly helping me rearrange the connections, energy, and love around me, allowing some old things to fade from view and gently pushing new forms of support and love into my life.

5. I decided to do a Vipassana course.

To be honest, those were truly some of the hardest ten days of my life. It felt like I was breaking down almost every single day, spinning inside whirlpools of emotion: pain, fear, emptiness, regret, anger and old wounds whose origins I could no longer clearly name, all rising to the surface layer after layer. During those ten days, I kept seeing the parts of myself deep inside that I didn’t want to face and was repeatedly forced to stop and look directly at them.

And it was in that state of “having nowhere to escape to” that I slowly started to figure many things out. I began to acknowledge the existence of those fears and pains and started to learn how to live with them.

I truly began to practice equanimity.

6. I decided to stay in Rio for a month.

Once, when I completely broke down, I called my parents. I was talking and sobbing at the same time, feeling like I’d been hollowed out. On the other end of the line, they could hear me crying, but didn’t really know what to say to comfort me.

My mum said, “Why don’t you just come back? We can travel in the south together.”

My dad said, “Go and see some of Brazil’s sights, take photos and send them to me. Once you’ve seen them, come back, we’ll be waiting for you here.”

In that moment, I almost bought a ticket to fly straight back to China or back to Argentina. I really wanted to return to a place that felt familiar and safe, where my family is. But at the same time, I knew very clearly that I had gone to so much effort to come all the way to Brazil, and I didn’t want to rush away in an escape.

I told myself that at the very least, before leaving, I wanted to experience the things I love: culture, art, nature, food.

I realised that I had hardly really eaten Brazilian food yet; instead, I’d been eating a lot of fruit and enjoying a period of “unlimited mango” feeling like my blood sugar might have been spiking a little lately. And I had a new love: unsweetened açaí, sour and cold.

So I stayed, and allowed myself to first really experience this country.

7. I decided to begin exploring this country on my own.

Many times, the same sentence still rises again and again in my mind: “If he were here, if he were here, if he were here…” As if his presence would make many difficulties less difficult, and many landscapes softer and more tender.

But the reality is: he isn’t here.

Also the reality is: I am on my own.

And in that reality, being by myself is pretty good too.

Yes, my emotions fluctuate a lot. Sometimes, I’ll suddenly start crying in a taxi for no apparent reason. Sometimes, I’ll burst into tears halfway through a hike, like a dam breaking all at once. Sometimes, when I wake up in the morning, I feel nothing but emptiness and pain, like there’s a patch of land in my chest where nothing has grown back yet.

There are days when I also feel a kind of fomo, like I haven’t “made the most” of Brazil: I haven’t gone dancing every night, haven’t gone to many parties, haven’t made a whole crowd of new friends, haven’t eaten Brazilian barbecue, haven’t tried BJJ. It can feel like, because I haven’t done this or that, I’m somehow failing the country or failing myself.

But later, I also find myself asking, “Why am I pushing myself like this?” Sometimes, when you’re sad, you’re just sad. On some nights, staying home alone and painting is a very good kind of company. Going to an independent cinema alone to watch a film can also make for a very gentle evening. Making myself a beautiful, healthy bowl of summer noodles at home, admiring the colours and freshness in the bowl, is also a way of loving myself.

In truth, “really experiencing Brazil” and “really taking care of myself” can coexist. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

Looking back now, truly, every step has been the best arrangement for me.

Even though every step has hurt as hell.

And because of all this, I’ve gained so much clarity,

about myself, about my relationship with my parents, and about how I show up in intimate relationships.

I’ve had so many dreams,

and my higher self, or maybe my subconscious, has been taking care of me, reminding me, and holding me in all kinds of ways.

I am truly very lucky to have met so many wonderful friends.

And I am also really strong.

After crying, I reach out for help, or quite literally hold myself and find ways to nourish myself.

At the same time, I have also lost some confidence.

Or, more precisely, I’ve begun to question myself more when it comes to how I am in intimate relationships.

Will I be this hurt again in my next relationship?

Will I repeat the same patterns again?

Will I once more fail to see clearly how things are unfolding and changing?

And yet, when I really look back at this relationship, I can also see very clearly that:

I was actually aware of each step along the way.

Every doubt I had in my heart, I more or less wrote down somewhere or spoke out loud.

I tried to communicate, I did my best to open myself up, and I tried to hold on to my faith in both myself and him.

This willingness to “open myself up so earnestly”, isn’t that, in itself, my way of loving?

Maybe I don’t need to be so harsh and suspicious of myself anymore.

Yes, there are many things I didn’t do well.

I lost myself in love.

I have a temper.

I have many wounds that haven’t fully healed yet.

But I don’t need to pathologise myself, or treat every one of my reactions as some kind of “disorder.”

I can be a little gentler with myself.

At the same time, to be honest, I know myself well.

When the day comes that I truly love someone again, I know what I’ll be like.

I will still throw myself in wholeheartedly.

I will still give 100%.

I will still be 100% present.

I will still give with my whole heart, love sincerely, and trust sincerely.

It’s just that next time, when I love someone in a romantic relationship,

I hope I’ll understand one thing more deeply:

When I love someone else,

I can’t lose Shikin again.

I can still be as tender, as intense, and as wholehearted in love as I used to be,

but I myself will be the priority in my own life.

And now, I’m going to put on my bikini, take my sunscreen, my Kindle, a big bottle of cold water, and a big mango, and head to the beach.