For AJ

Who inspired me to re-post this, as well as the next.

31 January, 2009

“It always fascinated me how people go from loving you madly to nothing at all, nothing.

It hurts so much.

When I feel someone is going to leave me,
I have a tendency to break up first before I get to hear the whole thing.

Here it is.

One more, one less.

Another wasted love story.

I really love this one.

When I think that it’s over,
that I’ll never see him again like this… well yes,

I’ll bump into him,
we’ll meet our new boyfriend and girlfriend,
act as if we had never been together,
then we’ll slowly think of each other less and less until we forget each other completely.

Almost.

Always the same for me.

Break up, break down.

Drunk up, fool around.

Meet one guy, then another, fuck around.

Forget the one and only.

Then after a few months of total emptiness start again to look for true love,
desperately look everywhere and after two years of loneliness meet a new love and swear it is the one,
until that one is gone as well.

There’s a moment in life where you can’t recover any more from another breakup.

And even if this person bugs you sixty percent of the time,
well you still can’t live without him. And even if he wakes you up every day by sneezing right in your face,
well you love his sneezes more than anyone else’s kisses.”

- Marion, 2 Days in Paris (2007)

Five months ago, I had this particular face on. It was despairing and miserable; uninterrupted; and if not fabulously enduring, it became a permanent fixture almost, toppling my smile right off its pedestal.

Last night I saw the same face on someone I have only met briefly prior. Although I don’t know her well, I knew her adequately enough to understand and discern the hurt I saw in her eyes, amongst all the tears that unfailingly sought an escape route over and over again.

So this blog post is for her.

Breakups suck.  And whilst every cut may be deeper than the other, whether the relationship lasted eight years or eight weeks, the lacerations will all seem equally irreparable; bleeding so much hurt and seeping exorbitant amounts of residual love, that it hardly seems possible to have anything left over for next time.

You wish he’d call – any excuse – but a small part of you really hopes he doesn’t if only for the fact that you know you won’t be able to muster the superhuman strength to walk away a second time.

Suddenly the concept of ‘routine’, that continually gets badgered, sounds so appealing. That ‘how was your day’ phone call at 5pm each day; the Friday nights you both dedicate to one another week in, week out; the doing rings around your local park together; the getting ice cream each Sunday; and the imaginary imprint he left in the passenger seat of your car. So routine, but never before have you craved it this much until now.

No one will freely break it to you but it can hurt for a long time. You’ll fall apart. An Armageddon inside your heart will occur. And for all the times you hear the line ‘it gets better in time’, you desperately wish it can collectively make the pain go away, even just for a day. It’s funny how words can only do so much, yet staring into space can impart immeasurable amounts of consolation.

Your tears don’t discriminate. They’ll make a break for it by the bucketload, on the bus, behind your desk, at 4am, or whilst you’re drowning your sorrows at an overcrowded bar during which your state of solace is rudely interrupted by the doof-doof music.

With the help of your well-meaning mates, a handful of inebriated moments will offer you relief for all but one night, whilst the rest of your weekends are punctuated with your BFFs waiting for you on the other side of the bathroom door, offering to hold your hair back whilst you purge everything and anything, tangible or otherwise. This comes after an emotional drunken stint on the valentine swing in someone else’s backyard whereby people you don’t recognise (the tears that profusely trickle down don’t help) offer their own advice like Subject Matter Experts whilst you harp on and on, incoherently for the most part, about how much you want him to be there to make everything better again.

Eurgh, pathetic.

Waking up is hard to do, but doing so becomes totally plausible if only for the fact that it will give you an opportunity to stop dreaming powerlessly about your one and only. The dreams are the worst bit.

Yep, breakups truly suck balls.

But you will get through it and you know you know it. With every day that passes, you’ll start to miss him less and less; and as unfathomable as it may seem, he will no longer inhabit an undeserving chunk of your weary mind. You’ll soon forget what heartbreak feels like; and, as sad as it may seem,  you’ll forget little by little how much you really were in love with him. As someone had said to me: “For a while you’ll feel as if you will never be able to be with anyone else…but one day you’ll wake up and realise you can longer bear the thought of being with him.” It is so true. The hard part is just being patient enough to see it come to fruition.

So milk it for all you can. No one is going to let you be this pathetic forever. Put that angry Alanis Morrisette song on repeat; treat yourself to that $20 UK Vogue that you once considered outrageously priced for a glossy; buy yourself lunch for 30 days’ straight; book a holiday; buy a handbag to fill the void; and cry on as many shoulders as you can whilst you can still get away with it.

For the record…it will get better in time.

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