I stopped waiting for him to come back. That's when I found myself.

For six months after my breakup, I had a ritual I was ashamed of. Every night, usually around 2am, I would open his Instagram and look for signs. A new photo. A tag. A story that might tell me whether he missed me too. Nobody knew. I would have died before telling my friends. They had all moved on to "you deserve better" speeches, and I was still stuck at the part where I just… missed him. The thing nobody tells you about heartbreak is that it isn't sadness. It's more like being in a waiting room. You're waiting to feel okay. Waiting to stop caring. Waiting for them to realise they made a mistake. You're just waiting, waiting, waiting — and the whole world is carrying on without you. I joined Kandhaa on a Wednesday night, mostly because I didn't know what else to do. I was honest in my profile in a way I'd never been anywhere else. I said I was going through a breakup, that I wasn't okay, that I wasn't looking to date — I just needed someone who understood. Within two days, I was talking to a woman named "Meera" (not her real name — we're both anonymous here). She had been through a divorce two years earlier. She told me something I've thought about almost every day since: "The waiting is actually grieving. You're not weak. You're doing the hardest thing — feeling it." That was the first time I cried in a way that felt like release and not just pain. I'm not "healed." I still have hard days. But I've deleted the Instagram habit. I've started writing again. And I have a real friendship with someone who has never judged me for how broken I was. If you're in the waiting room right now — come find us. We're in here too.