On Heartbreak

You’re like the cold side of the pillow.

It was the first time I’d heard it. It was early in the morning and we couldn’t stop laughing under the covers. He kissed me soft, then self-assured. He paused, then considered. He said it to me and I didn’t understand. Like when you’re sleeping and you get really hot and you flip your pillow so you can feel the cold. That’s when I knew he loved me.

My version of the cold side of the pillow is when you poke one leg out from underneath the covers and the air from the ceiling fan turned on high sweeps across your bare skin. I loved him the same but with more detail. I can describe almost every moment intricately. The way his eyes changed color depending on the shade of his surroundings or the color of his shirt, traversing milky blue and sea green. How sometimes his eyes would soften when he’d look at me. It was Your Eyes; that look.

The first time he kissed me, I was crying. My heart was heavy and he kissed my tears. There was something immense about him—something immediate, like I had to have him. The Anatomy of Longing, I called it. I wrote about it in a poem of the same name. Everything just kept pulling me, pulling me in. And I was completely submersed.

It was all so fast. Then he was gone.

He told me he didn’t love me anymore the same place I felt it the first time, almost two years later.

I had just gotten home from moving my sister to Oregon last September, a trip that I thought I had gained clarity from during the 20-hour drive there from Colorado. It was on the Over The Rivers and Through the Woods Scenic Byway in Willamette National Forest, listening to Eyes by Rogue Wave and navigating the complex network of bends, like veins, while admiring the bold simplicity of the cedar trees. One thing I’m missing is in your eyes, sung over gentle drum beat palpitations.

In that moment, a combined fade and grain VSCO filter actualized in real-time, I felt home in a way. Singing alongside my sister to music we used to love on full volume, I was reminded of who I am: a lover. Someone who catches a line in a song and clings to it. Someone who writes novels about infinitesimal moments with infinite tenderness.

I hadn’t felt quite like myself in what felt like years. I’d been so focused on huge life changes. I cheated on my ex-boyfriend of six years and it was difficult to separate our lives when it ended, which had been entwined for so long. I put all my writing out there and still couldn’t build a career with it. I had to leave a job I loved with the people I was closest with so I could focus on a new relationship because he was my former boss and I couldn’t deal with the drama that it caused anymore. I started a job I grew to hate. I felt uprooted in all avenues of my life and it was difficult to make appropriate adjustments to feel okay again. I was self-harming. I struggled to express myself. I closed myself off from everyone but my boyfriend and even then, it seemed like I couldn’t properly communicate. I used to cry because everything was so big and so all at once and I would tell him, I just want to go home. I wanted to feel like things in my life were familiar again, like everything was in its right place, whatever that meant.

But in the woods, over the rivers, in his eyes, I was home.

I wanted to start choosing happiness again. To choose love above all else. To let things go, whether it was misplaced guilt, correctly placed guilt, insecurities, the past, or dreams unfulfilled.

I knew I hadn’t been completely vulnerable in my relationship. The abrupt switch between my ex boyfriend and my then current one was rough. I didn’t give myself enough time. I didn’t give myself any space. We were bonded so quickly, moved in together after only a few months. I had real thoughts that this could be it and we could want to spend the rest of our lives together, no matter how absurd that sounded, even to me, the hopeless romantic.

When we first started dating, we were in the kitchen, where we relished most of our closest memories, and he pulled me in his arms. I could see us wanting to get married in six months, he said with pronounced confidence. How did he know that was exactly what I was thinking? I visualized it the same.

But two years later, I wasn’t giving him everything and I wanted to. We love differently. We express love differently. And I was suddenly beginning to understand it. I had been putting so much pressure on my expectations of love and where I wanted to be in my life.

The one thing I was missing was just letting it be. I wanted to now approach love with less intensity because it had always been all-consuming for me for everyone that I have dated, I neglected myself. I wanted to let our love speak for itself and then I could start loving me more in the process. I would stop self-harming. I would be more honest.

The irony of the song lyric I was obsessing over is not lost on me now. While I was having some kind of cathartic epiphany about being better for the both of us, I was missing something from him. He didn’t want us anymore. Our ideas were no longer aligned. But in the moment, as my sister and I braved the weary drive, the road undulating underneath us and the trees humming alongside Rogue Wave, I was unaware I was about to lose my very best friend.

For a long time I thought I must be crazy. I felt his love, still. How could it not be there anymore? So suddenly. I felt it in his hesitation; I felt it in every decision he made after. I felt it when he couldn’t completely detach from our situation for months.

And even more, what about the times we’d cook using three randomly generated ingredients in our version of Chopped and we’d stop mid-stir just to dance to Slow Dancing in A Burning Room like we were the only two people in the world? What about when he’d take my hand on the sidewalk and swiftly spin me around once and end it by pulling me forward, almost like launching, and it always made me smile no matter what mood I was in? What about the dumb games we played in the shower like drawing on the steamed glass with our fingers and we’d take turns adding to the picture? Or when I’d wash my hair and he’d discreetly move from where he was standing to somewhere inconspicuous and I’d have to feel around to find him, eyes closed, like shower hide and seek? What about when he’d come home from a long day at work well past 3 am, visibly defeated, and he’d hold my waist as we lie at the edge of the bed and not have to say anything? That was love, right? I felt his love. I’m not crazy. How could everything feel so right to me but so wrong to him? And how could I be so wrong about it?

When he broke up with me, I lost a lot of confidence. I didn’t know who I was without how he made me feel.

And then we lived together for almost four months after, separate but together. And I don’t think anything hurt me more than that distance.

I know the sound of his car distinctly because the engine is loud and we lived in a first floor apartment by the building’s garage so I was always made aware he was home at least two minutes before the front door would unlock. It used to sound like coming home; I’d run to the door from wherever I was in the apartment just to greet him by jumping into his arms expecting him to catch all of my weight and kissing his face firmly and deep as if he’d gotten back from a months-long trip. Then, it started to sound more like driving away. In the mornings after he stopped staying in the apartment at night, I couldn’t sleep. I’d wake up alone in my corner of his king-size bed periodically every hour waiting for the garish roaring of his ’96 Camaro.

September 22, 2019 2:57 am [text sent and evidence deleted, no response] Can I ask you why you don’t wanna be home?

Half asleep, I’d dreamily see him walking in the door to our bedroom and kissing my neck. Regularly I’d have seemingly real dreams where everything was normal. I’d wake up in the middle of the night repeatedly thinking that he was cooking us dinner, steak with some kind of over salted vegetable, our favorite. That he was watching The Office in the living room. It was almost as if I could actually hear the opening credits, the cold open where Jim makes Dwight believe he was murdered in his hotel room, his genuine laugh when the wardrobe door says “It was Dwight” in crude red script like it was his first time watching it and not the tenth.

I couldn’t tell what world I was living in. This strange in-between. I recently even had a dream about him asking me what toiletries I needed from the grocery store. Are you in this world or the green world? I wrote. I had had a dream where everything I saw was filtered by sea green. This green world had him in it and it was the same as the real world but we were together. I couldn’t distinguish reality. I was losing my mind.

Our lease was up and we moved into a new apartment together while he was away on a work trip for two and a half weeks, to save money we said. It wouldn’t be permanent. And then he came home. And when he came back, I built all these ideas in my head that he wasn’t really leaving me. You can become quickly disillusioned when you sleep in the same bed. When you still spend time together. When you do the monotonous things like watch Netflix while he played League of Legends in the same room. When you still go out for lunch before work. Or dress up to try new restaurants within a mile radius of our new apartment that’s not our apartment on our days off. When we take Obi, our dog (my dog?), on walks together. When he referred to purchasing a new dresser as our dresser, maybe by accident.

Then there were the days he wasn’t there and I had to remind myself of the truth. I felt so lost. Like I didn’t know what home was anymore, again. I just want to go home.

But, baby steps.

At first, I made the commitment to run a mile every day for a month when he broke up with me. I’d choose a new song and play it on repeat compulsively like a tired anthem. Once I’d get to the halfway point by the bluffs from our former apartment that we shared, I’d sit on the same rock and cry. Then I’d take a deep breath and head back, running him off. I downloaded a meditation app and meditated every morning for the first three weeks, sobbing through the ten minutes just trying to breathe. I ate by myself for the first time, in our favorite restaurant and I cried when the waitress brought me my sushi. Every time I served a couple at the steakhouse where I work or the musician in the bar would play a country song I knew because of him, I’d lock myself in the bathroom stall, powerless to my tears.

I wrote poetry and entered a contest for it. Thirty haikus about him that I read on stage to him in the audience. I lost. I read my daily horoscope even though I don’t believe in them, my desperate attempt at gaining some kind of control of my fate. And I read his. Since I didn’t have a car anymore, I talked to every rideshare driver about our situation to and from work. I started to talk to myself. Out loud. And sometimes I’d record it.

I went on a semi-date, my first real date with someone who wasn’t already my boyfriend. When he took me home, he took his hands off the steering wheel and told me we’d die if I didn’t take it over. When he dropped me off, I told him I had to urgently pee to dodge him walking me to the door.

I’d rearrange and realign the bottles on the bathroom counter and in the shower daily subscribing fully to my OCD. I counted everything. I watched the same movies obsessively reciting the lines to Sleeping With Other People, Celeste and Jesse Forever, A Marriage Story, and Someone Great. Listened to the same songs on repeat. Skipped the same songs. Texted or FaceTimed anyone who would listen. I talked to everyone: my coworkers who became my best friends, reconnected with my childhood best friend who was oddly going through something similar, Uber and Lyft drivers. I became a Yes Woman. I said yes to giving out my phone number. Yes to friends. Yes to help when I needed it. Yes to crying. Yes to fostering a random Uber driver’s six-week-old puppy, Eridonus (affectionately nicknamed Orthodontist). To going to Portland. To being with new people.

But life was easier when he loved me. I only had to think about what made him happy. I only ever thought of dates I could plan (he always wanted to go to Red Rocks), gifts I could buy (why didn’t I order Monopoly Deal, the game we played in Florida but could never find, online?), dinners we could make (we never got to try another way to cook cactus), or songs he would like (Her World or Mine by Michael Gray). There wasn’t space for anything but what I gave to him. Now I get to reference him in the past tense. New people I meet only get to know him as the him that isn’t him to me.

Did we get too close? Did I expect too much? Should I have not said the thing about the music playlist being important to me for our hypothetical wedding? Should we have danced to another song in the kitchen? Now Slow Dancing In a Burning Room is so ironic it’s humiliating to think back on my ignorance. We’re goin’ down, and you can see it too. We’re goin’ down and you know that we’re doomed. Should I have not written down all my thoughts on my phone for you to read? Could I have been more? Should I have said less?

December 13, 2019 [journal entry in blue marker] 2:41 am Why does it still hurt the same?

I thought for a long time that if I put the energy I want into the world, I’ll get what I want. But I put it all out there and I didn’t. Just immeasurable unrequited love.

There’s a scene in Sleeping With Other People where a reposeful guitar instrumental song crescendos as best friends Jake and Lainey wonder if they’re in love with each other as they lie in bed. And there’s mostly silence and small gestures and then they agree they must be in love. Lainey asks, what are we going to do about it? She pauses. What do you wanna do? Jake replies with nothing. There’s nothing to do. After profound consideration for a moment, Jake looks into Lainey’s eyes and says I love you for free, Lainey. There’s nothing they can do about it. I love him for free. It is unconditional, untethered by anything but the weight of how I feel even still.

My love for him is so big. Now what do I do with it?

I know my love for him makes me strong. How I love big makes me strong, even if right now I am not in the place where I feel like I can receive love. I feel so numb about it. So indifferent. Someone could buy me a million of everything I’ve always wanted in every color and say exactly everything I want to hear and the best I could give them is that I care about them. And I think about how that’s how it must be for him. It won’t reach him. It can’t. Maybe not ever again from me.

After he kissed me for the first time, I asked him out of fear if I was enough for him. I was making an enormously challenging and metamorphic decision to be with him. He said I was. I’ve been struggling with that in particular. Not enough to make him stay. My big love was not enough.

Heartbreak is almost physical. I feel it like shattered glass in my bones. It hits me like a groundswell, broad and seismic. It’s like a pestering friend you don’t want to bring to a party but do anyway because you feel obligated to be there for them so you entertain their presence because you invited them along in the first place. It’s vulnerable vulnerability. It’s like having my heart completely exposed on the operating table under glaring surgical lighting, my chest cavity peeled back with a dull kitchen-grade paring knife and all the doctors are unlicensed teenagers with a penchant for torturing small animals.

It’s all I know.

Valentine’s Day for me is not about heartbreak, though. It’s about finding big love. It’s about under the covers deciding there’s a favorite part of their shoulder compelled to spin in the middle of the sidewalk can’t get you out of my head love. It’s about knowing, I guess, that there are different functions of love. The young love I had when I was 17 where we talked about our dreams in the basement that ended on my 20th birthday. The six-year love where we began to build a life and maybe out of naivety gradually tore it down. The all-consuming one-sided love that taught me about equity and real heartache. There are no accidental meetings of the heart. Though he doesn’t love me anymore, I can look back on our experience with delicate gratitude. I get to understand what it means to love for free. I just hope that one day someone will see me the way that I see them, with just as much attention to detail.