I turned 30 last August.
One week before my birthday, I and my ex-boyfriend separated.
We had intended differently. After one year of sharing a couple life, let us have one last month together; and when September comes, we shall turn the page.
So, gradually, my ex-boyfriend moved his belongings out of my house. His clothes, his shoes, his camping equipment—one by one—went absent. I watched the hallway grow longer each day; while presence and warmth—little by little—left our relationship.
We looked at each other with eyes hollow and weary from dozens of what-could-have-beens one moment and hopelessness the next—knowing our journeys were meant to part. In the dark capsule of grief, we fought in desperation, screamed in resentment, and held each other in wordless tears.
Our insistent togetherness couldn’t stop the wave of loss from sucking me into its motion, pulling me up in the air, hanging me on its collapsing wall of water, and plummeting my forceless body down the ocean bottom with its million tons of pain.
That Friday morning, in a sunny cafe garden where birds sang over a little pond and rice fields unfolded to the horizon, we nodded, “Let’s stop here”. He bagged the last pieces of clothing, played the last songs on his guitar, kissed me goodbye, and walked out the gate of my home.
Alone in the courtyard that just extended twice as large, I looked around my blurry and wobbly garden, finding what remained of this emotional earthquake. A thought echoed from the other side of my aftershock, “I still have a workshop to deliver tomorrow”.
I walked myself to the bathroom and washed up. I picked up my cat, Peanut, put him on my lap, kissed him on his forehead, and rubbed his belly while rocking us back and forth on the edge of my bed.
Peanut purred in my arms. Currents of warmth and love spread across my body the way a heating pad eases menstrual pains. I hugged him into my chest, “It’s just you and me now, baby. We’ll take care of each other, won’t we?”.
Tears came flooding in.
“I’d take all the heartbreaks in my life combined any day—to trade for this”
I told a friend before leaving to pick up Peanut from the vet. He’d been sick for four days—his first serious illness since 2020.
Throughout our four years together, he’s always been a tireless force of aliveness, playfulness, joy, and tranquility.
When I relocated to Hoian and rebuilt my life, Peanut rejoiced with me and rediscovered his world—leaving no trees unclimbed and no roofs unconquered. When my career hit rock bottom, and when a 5-year relationship ended, he anchored me. Amidst the chaos, I looked to his untroubled serenity for doses of peace. By his warm, purring fluffiness, I regulated my body. Even when it all seems to turn sideways, he’s an unchanging monument of love I could always shelter by— an ever-existing home.
But right then, Peanut was none but a soul fighting for his life.
At the vet, he curled up into a tiny ball of fragility; one of his paws was needled and chained to an intravenous fluid bottle. At home, he restlessly dragged his skinny body to deep and dark corners under the sink or behind the toilet. His eyes and meows spoke the same message—pain.
So I canceled my appointments, borrowed a mini heater, and a gigantic cage, created a fund I named “Peanut”, and transferred all the money from my travel budget into it. I held one of his paws and told him, “Everything will be alright”, as we rushed to the best animal clinic in Danang—30 km away from where we live—that noon.
Inside the carrier, Peanut was hyperventilating with his mouth open.
I stepped around the yet-to-dry bloodstains on the floor to get to the examining table—where Peanut was lying, facing the other way.
My jaw dropped in terror. I reach out one trembling hand to touch the petrifying reality before me—Peanut’s head resting willlessly on its side, his tongue—unprecedentedly elongated and purple—hanging out from the side of his open mouth and sticking to the table, his eyes starring aimlessly.
I looked to the doctor for an explanation.
“As you’ve witnessed, he threw up blood…”
So this phenomenon was just a post-vomit situation—for a nanosecond, I held onto that belief.
“He’s gone. We did our very best to….”
The next words were lost on me. The ground underneath me shook and cracked open. I involuntarily howled and collapsed onto the table beside my cat.
My baby is dead?
I helplessly looked at the doctor in disbelief. Then, at Peanut’s body. Images of him rolling around in my garden only 5 days before flashed through my mind. Spasms of wail took over my body. I covered my mouth but any strength I had left could only hold me on that table. Couldn’t stop, and couldn’t care less—I blubbered away in bottomless pain. Bouts of squalls and streams of snot flooded me.
“I’ll give you a minute”, the doctor left me and Peanut in the cold room of death after putting a box of tissue by my arms.
I leaned over to pet Peanut’s head. I kissed him on his forehead, on his ears, then, on one side of his cheeks. I rubbed his belly. I caressed his paws. I whispered to him unarticulated words amidst tears. Then I realized before me was a dead body with a chest stopped breathing and limps stiffened.
Many minutes passed while I kept stroking him and sobbing and piling up snot-filled tissues. Nobody entered the room completely sunk in grief.
10 days after my birthday, my cat left me.
Under the last sunlight of that same day, Peanut was laid on my garden table.
The heater I had borrowed to keep him warm was now helping his carcass less cold. I cleansed his body. And two friends came to say goodbye.
Alone in the courtyard that just extended ten times as large, I looked around the house once filled with light, life, and love—now buried in darkness, loss, and loneliness. Refused to step inside that hollow, I curled up on the garden bench, holding Peanut’s remains in my chest and soaking in tears.
There I was—in my dream garden house—homeless, loveless, and lifeless.
I sat there for hours in the dark garden, cuddling and kissing and stroking the cold body of my cat while reliving our memories.
Later that night, I put Peanut on a towel and placed him next to me in bed. Every time I woke up during that night’s troubled sleep and saw the familiar silhouette of the back of Peanut’s head in dimness, I’d imagine him turning his belly over or swinging his tail. I reach out to brush his back. But not once did he move.
I buried Peanut in a nearby open garden the next morning.
Then came home and started to clean the house. Every stroke of the broom felt utterly lonely—Peanut wasn’t chasing it. The next moment saw me gasping for air on the floor, next to the fallen broomstick, begging for a dose of amnesia.
A few days later, I canceled my travel plans and decided to take a sabbatical for the rest of September.
One day, I woke up to a full-day rain marking my long-expected seasonal change—autumn was arriving in the beach town of Hoian. Every breath of wind was turning the page of my journal that had been filled with woeful poems.
I framed Peanut’s pictures and put them in his favorite spots. I cut my hair, added a few Monsterras in my house, and bought a used bicycle. I took it to the beach, amidst the paddies, and into every corner around the neighborhood. When it was sunny, I put on sunglasses. When it rained, I held an umbrella.
Around Hoian’s bicycle heaven, I slid through the air. Breezes blew into my hair, my ruffle pink sleeves, and my armpits—teasing with my inner child. I greeted every dog appearing along the way. I took every turn—many times—knowing they were dead-ends.
I rode through greenness after greenness, absorbing nature’s infinite abundance. In that newfound aliveness, I wished to be deeper immersed in the healing wonder of Mother Earth—like a kitten snuggling into its mama’s tummy for love and protection.
I spent days plant-shopping and garden-arranging. I put a desk in my garden. Around it, a few banana plants and plenty of flowers. My garden workstation emerged and I dived right into the arms of beautiful Lady Autumn.
Alone in the courtyard dotted by swaying blossoms, I looked around the house, bathed in the vibrant colors shining under the sunlight, and inhaled the love newly planted in my place—the love sprouted in my heart from the seed of loss.
I saw love overflowing my sight—across the painting my friend gifted me for my birthday, among the freshly watered plants, and in my other cat yawning on the sofa.
Has love returned?
I realized not.
Love didn’t leave me. Love has never left.
Love has always been with me and in me.
Love was present in my pain, my loss, my grief.
Love was reflected onto my ex-boyfriend, to Peanut, to the eyes of Cotton—my friend’s dog I’ve been walking—and now, to the purring sensation of Sesame—my newly adopted kitten—sleeping soundly on my lap.
Love is here. Love is me.
I am Love. I am Home.
I’ve arrived—always—at Love and at Home.
“Thank you for blessing my footsteps forward”
I spoke to the image of Peanut sitting in my bicycle’s basket—with eyes awe-amazed by the big wide scenery.
At a dead-end in the middle of a paddy, I got off my bike and sat on the side of the track, contemplating impermanence under the vast blue sky, beside horizon-filled greenery.
There, I saw him.
“Please let me embrace and be Love in all its impermanence”
That day, amidst the rice field, a quote from Maria Popova in her article “Love Anyway” came to my mind.
“You know that the price of love is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the light will soon fade, knowing that the loving face too will one day fade into indifference or bone, and you love anyway—because life is transient but possible, because love alone bridges the impossible and the eternal”
And I am that Love.
I realized I love more after all that loss—in deeper, bigger, louder, sillier, purer, and freer ways.
From every crack in my heart, Love grew—like wild daisies under Hoian’s autumn rains.
Love is unstoppable—so am I.
May this story ease your soul—should you ever experience loss, pain, and grief in your life.
May you remember—YOU are Love; YOU are Home.
With every breath, you’ve always arrived—at Love and at Home.
May you embrace and be Love in all its impermanence—for that is how life plants love back inside you—where it has always been.
Love,
Kim