It had been a long goodbye. Not the dramatic kind, but the quiet unraveling of a life built together, boxes filled with shared memories, a key handed back without ceremony, the silence after the final “take care.”

I didn’t cry when he left. I didn’t shout. I just stood in the kitchen, holding a chipped mug we both used to reach for, and realised how many versions of myself I had packed away to make things work. I wasn’t heartbroken, exactly. I was hollow. And in some ways, that felt worse. A friend told me I should go for a walk. “Get outside,” she said. “Let the world remind you it’s still turning.” So I did.

The Message in Stillness, When Life Whispers Instead of Shouts

I don’t believe in signs the way some people do, not in every cloud or lucky coin, but I do believe in timing. In tiny, precise moments that meet you where you are.

That butterfly had no reason to stop on me. But it did. And something about its stillness made me stop, too. I thought about all the ways I had been clinging, holding tight to plans, expectations, old hopes. I thought about how hard I’d tried to fix something that maybe wasn’t mine to fix. I thought about how tired I was of pretending I was okay when I wasn’t even sure what “okay” meant anymore.

And then, just as gently as it had come, the butterfly lifted off and flew away. I watched it disappear into the soft light between the trees, and something in me loosened. Not everything. Just enough.