My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
My First Solo Trip After the Breakup — The Weekend I Stopped Waiting to Feel Whole
By Lila, 27 — Brooklyn, NY
I booked the cabin on a Wednesday night at 11 p.m., lying sideways on my couch with mascara still on from a shoot I’d done that morning. I hadn’t cried in about three days, which felt like progress. The listing said “rustic A-frame, Catskills, sleeps two.” Sleeps two. I almost closed the tab. But something in me — maybe spite, maybe exhaustion, maybe the beginning of something braver — clicked “Reserve” before I could talk myself out of it.
Eli and I had been broken up for six weeks. Together for three years before that. He was the kind of person who filled every silence with a podcast or a playlist or a question about dinner. I didn’t realize how loud my life had been until it went quiet. And I didn’t realize how much of my identity I’d folded into his until I tried to unfold it and found creases everywhere.
My friends were wonderful. They rotated through my apartment like a relief crew — wine on Tuesdays, takeout on Fridays, someone always ready to say “you deserve better” at exactly the right moment. But I started to notice that even their comfort had a shape I was fitting myself into. The Brave Girl. The One Who’s Doing So Well. I was performing recovery the same way I’d performed the relationship: carefully, with my best angles forward.
So I booked the cabin. And I told no one.
The Drive Up
I left Brooklyn on a Friday afternoon in late October. The traffic on the Thruway was terrible and I sat in it with the windows down, smelling exhaust and wet leaves at the same time. I had no playlist queued. No podcast. Just the sound of my own car and other people’s horns and the strange, underrated pleasure of not narrating my life to anyone.
Eli and I used to do this drive together, back when we’d rent places upstate with friends. He always drove. I always navigated. It occurred to me, somewhere around New Paltz, that I hadn’t driven more than forty minutes alone in years. My hands on the wheel felt unfamiliar, like I was borrowing someone else’s competence.
The cabin was smaller than the photos. They always are. But it was clean, and it smelled like cedar, and there was a window above the bed that framed nothing but pine trees and a darkening sky. I dropped my bag on the floor and stood in the middle of the room and thought: now what?
That question — now what — had been following me for six weeks. In my apartment it sounded desperate. Here, surrounded by trees and silence, it sounded almost like an invitation.
The First Night
I made pasta with jarred sauce and ate it sitting on the porch steps, even though it was cold enough to see my breath. The stars were absurd. I’d forgotten that stars could be absurd — that there could be so many of them they stop looking real. In Brooklyn the sky is a kind of orange-gray ceiling. Here it was open in a way that made my chest ache.
I thought about calling someone. My mom. My friend Priya. Even Eli, for one weak, fleeting second. But I put my phone on the kitchen counter, face down, and let the impulse pass. It passed faster than I expected.
I took a bath. The cabin had one of those old clawfoot tubs, shallow and a little stained, with water that took forever to get hot. I sat in it with my knees up and no candles and no music and no intention of making it aesthetic. I just sat there. I felt the water on my skin and the cool air on my shoulders and the strange, almost forgotten sensation of being a body that belonged only to me.
I’d been thinking a lot about that — about belonging to myself. Somewhere in the last three years, I’d stopped. Not in a dramatic way. Eli never controlled me or told me what to do. But I’d slowly, unconsciously, started filtering everything through him. What I wore. When I went to bed. What I wanted. Especially what I wanted. I’d gotten so used to considering his needs alongside mine that I’d lost track of where mine started.
In the tub, pruning and a little cold, I realized I didn’t even know what temperature I liked the water. I’d always matched his preference. Hot, almost scalding. Turns out I like it warm. Just warm.
Something Shifted
Saturday morning I woke up at 6 a.m. without an alarm. The light through the pine-framed window was gray-blue and soft, the kind of light I usually chase with a camera but rarely just sit in. I made coffee in a French press I found in the cabinet and drank it black on the porch, wrapped in a blanket that smelled like someone else’s laundry detergent.
I spent the morning shooting. Not for a client, not for my portfolio, not for Instagram. Just shooting. Bark. Light on water. My own bare feet on the cold porch wood. I hadn’t photographed without purpose in so long that I’d forgotten what it felt like — like playing. Like being curious without needing the curiosity to produce something.
In the afternoon I drove to a small town nearby and bought a used paperback from a shop that also sold homemade candles. I ate a grilled cheese at a diner where the waitress called me “hon” and didn’t ask if I was waiting for someone. I sat in a booth by the window and read and watched people walk by and felt, for the first time in weeks, like I wasn’t missing anything by being alone.
That evening I did something I hadn’t done in a long time. I’d brought a small bag with me — toiletries, a sleep mask, a wellness device I’d ordered weeks ago during one of those late-night internet spirals where you’re not really shopping, you’re just trying to feel like you’re doing something about the sadness. It had been sitting in my nightstand drawer since it arrived, still in the box. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to open it in the apartment. It felt too loaded there, in the bed where Eli and I used to sleep, surrounded by all the furniture of our shared life.
But here, in this cabin that held no memories of anyone, I opened the box. And I don’t want to say it changed my life, because that’s not what happened. What happened was smaller and more important than that. I remembered that my body could feel good on my own terms. Not as a performance. Not as part of a negotiation. Not filtered through someone else’s response. Just mine.
I’d lost that somewhere. Not suddenly — Jenny, a girl I met at a photography workshop once, told me something that stuck with me. She said she hadn’t realized how much she’d been affected by losing a part of herself until she got it back. That’s what it was like. I didn’t know what was missing until it was there again, quiet and simple and entirely my own.
Afterward I lay in the dark and listened to the trees and felt my own heartbeat slow and thought: this is what it feels like to come back to yourself. Not all at once. Not with fireworks. Just one small, honest moment in a borrowed bed in the woods.
The Drive Home
Sunday I packed slowly. I washed my coffee mug and folded the blanket and stripped the bed even though I didn’t have to. I took one last photo from the porch — just the trees, just the light, nothing composed — and got in the car.
The drive back was different from the drive up. Not because the traffic was better or the weather had changed, but because I had. Something in my posture. Something in the way I held the wheel. I drove with the windows cracked and the heat on, which made no sense and felt perfect.
I didn’t call anyone from the road. I didn’t post anything. I just drove, and watched the trees thin out and the highway signs multiply and the sky turn from open blue to that familiar Brooklyn gray, and I felt — not happy exactly, not healed, but present. Like I’d spent a weekend with someone I was just getting to know and was looking forward to seeing her again.
What I Know Now
That trip was four months ago. I’ve been back to the Catskills twice since then, both times alone, both times on purpose. I’ve started shooting personal work again — not for clients, not for the grid, just for me. Last week I spent an entire Sunday afternoon photographing shadows on my apartment wall and felt the kind of satisfaction I used to only get from external validation.
I’m not over the breakup in the way movies promise — I still miss Eli sometimes, mostly on Sunday mornings when the apartment is quiet and there’s no one to argue about where to get bagels. But I’ve stopped waiting to feel whole. I’ve stopped treating my own company as a consolation prize.
The thing no one tells you about breakups is that the hardest part isn’t losing the other person. It’s finding out how much of yourself you gave away without noticing. And the only way to get it back is to be alone long enough to hear your own voice again — not the voice that says what you think someone wants to hear, but the real one. The quiet one. The one that knows what temperature she likes the water.
I think that’s what a highlight moment is, at least for me. Not a peak. Not a climax. Just a point where you look around and realize: I’m here. And here is enough.
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