The Art of Breaking Up
Note: This is from a while ago when I was being an idiot with Gabe (read: the usual!). There are no breakups occurring in my life right now and Gabe and I are super. I just know a few friends who are going through breakups and might need to read something like this. Maybe you do, too. Enjoy.
I’m sort of floating around right now. I’m drinking Tab for breakfast, it’s the first time I’ve ever had it. It reminds me of Back to the Future for some reason. I have class at noon and I didn’t go to spinning this morning. I’m just bad the day after something ends. I always open my eyes and lay in my bed and for the first split second, I forget that anything has changed, I just know that my eyelashes are fluttering and almost hitting my eyelids.
Then I remember that things are different. I don’t move for a while and then I put on music. I’ll methodically make a mix that feels appropriate or I’ll hone in on one song that encompasses everything I’m feeling and listen to it on repeat. When my ex and I broke up for the final time, I listened to No Children by the Mountain Goats for seven hours while I just sat around my apartment feeling sorry for myself. With an ex-manfriend, the song was I Thought You Were My Boyfriend by the Magnetic Fields. It becomes a religious experience, the making of mixes, the worship of one particular song. Months later when I hear the particular song relating to some breakup, I always cringe. I think of hours and days spent laying on the floor in my panties and some Batman tshirt being angry and sad and trying not to text whichever ex that breakup was with.
While listening to the chosen ritualistic music, there’s also the sorting through of the remains of a relationship, the relics if you will. Photos, clothing, notes left on the fridge, email, old text messages, the leftovers they left in your fridge, the whole milk they drank next to my own soy milk. I get upset and throw it away, filling a Hefty bag with all that shit and taking it downstairs to the dumpster. There’s always that shameful moment when I’m about to heave the bag into the trash that I realize what I’m doing and can’t let go. I tear open the ties and pull out whatever item I can’t part with yet. Once it was a moo cow tshirt you used to wear to bed and another time it was some awful mix someone made me that had Maroon 5 on it. I wish I was kidding.
Soon after the hoarding of the relics begins the pilgrimage to many, many bars and also friends’ houses where you drink lots of alcohol and talk too much. I always go out with my friends and say, “Fuck yeah! I’m single now, I’m going to get fucked up and make out with random dudes all night!”. My friends cheer me verbally while fear fills their eyes and they realize that they’re going to have to make sure I don’t have a meltdown. They can smell the crazy on me despite the Chanel Cristalle I have on. We hit the bar and I drink whiskey after whiskey until everyone looks like a potted plant. I rarely actually make out with anyone since I suddenly remember halfway through the night that you won’t be there to clean vomit out of my hair if I throw up later. My lower lip trembles and I begin to cry. My friends efficiently remove me from the premises and take me somewhere of my choosing, usually involving pancakes. They are good friends. They sit while I sob into my hashbrowns and they help me cut up my pancakes as I discuss how I’m not really that upset about the breakup, it’s just the alcohol. Then I comment on how that ex is a piece of shit and everyone agrees. I make it home in one piece thanks to the kindness of others.
When I get home, I am still glowing from the warm, attentive love of my friends and for a little while, all seems well. Then I see my bed and realize that I’ll be sleeping alone. The sheets still smell like whoever was the most recent co-occupant of that bed and I suddenly dread climbing in and sleeping. So I open a bottle of whiskey or wine and pour myself a glass. After one breakup, I drank a bottle of rosé in my bathtub and sang Otis Redding songs at the top of my lungs until my neighbor banged on the wall at 4 AM threatening to murder me. It’s hard to deal sometimes. You know. When I’m finally so drunk that I can’t tell if I’m sleeping in my bed or in a pit of lava, I collapse nude in my bed and pass out until I wake up the next morning and the contents of my stomach become best friends with my toilet.
After this shameful display, I have the realization that this recently departed person is not coming back and it’s time to move on. 98.3% of the time I have this epiphany with my face against the tile floor of my bathroom. I make tea, I eat a banana, I wash my face. I clean up the mess I have undoubtedly made the night before. I put away the relics of broken love; they don’t get throw away yet, just hidden so they are out of mind. I make a mix of happy things, wise music that will make me realize that this, too, is just temporary. Anything involving Jenny Lewis is recommended. I write in my journal, I draw pictures, I dance around. This helps more than you can know.
The hardest thing to do post-breakup for me is breaking the little habits you’re used to. You’re not making dinner for two anymore and you can’t get the big calzone at your favorite Italian take out restaurant because it will be too much for just you. He won’t be calling you on your lunch break anymore and you’re not going to have someone to yell to from the other room to tell random things to. I am a lover of words and I always miss the emails and the text messages, the physical handwritten letters as well, if your ex lover sent you those. I always ache for the few words sent to my phone that make me smirk during math class: filthy, loving, random, mundane, philosophical, sweet. Those words, those routines aren’t there anymore. You have to find a new gym partner, someone else to go to the Farmers Market with on Saturday mornings, someone who will watch zombie movies with you. Existing friends will fill these spots nicely and so will new people that you meet along the way. It’s just a matter of rewiring yourself to exist on your own again. I think anyone who has gone through a breakup knows that it’s not as easy as it sounds.
It’s strange the effect someone you are romantically involved with can have on your life. You share with them perhaps more than with anyone else in your life: time, space, fluids, secrets, emotion. They knew you inside and out, your expressions, the way your body feels and moves, the way you react to things, your tastes. When it ends, it seems as if you wasted time. At first, I always feel like an idiot. I think, “I should have spent more time studying or writing or working out and instead I focused on spending time with this person and nothing worked out”, as if I would have thought any more with my head than my heart if I had to do it all over again. Something comes of each person, a change of some sort and it’s hard to say whether that’s good or bad. It’s hard to see that when things are fresh, I never can. I’m still feeling things too much to see anything for what it is. I have to write myself notes sometimes reminding myself that all these failures are preparing me for the next time, they’re training me for the next person, hopefully someone who fits better. I will be smarter, better, stronger next time. Don’t we all really believe this as we start to pick ourselves up? I do because I have hope, too much sometimes.
But every time, I free fall just as hard for the next one. I dive in eyes closed and say fuck it. I throw my whole body, my soul into the fall, into love, into that new person. I can’t help it, I love and then think about how I’ll pick up my bones later. I’ll do this every time no matter how much I’m hating fixing up my wounds right now. My brain always reaches the rest of my body way too late and it begins again.
