If You Knew How It Ended
You are 28 and you feel like a rubbed-raw carcass, scraps of flesh clinging to the bone. Your new therapist tells you that it must be both exhilarating and exhausting to be in your head, to process the way you do. Yes, you think — and say, because you believe in a fairly short line between thinking and saying — that’s exactly right.
You took the sack of sensation and sentience that is you and you paced around the city you call and sometimes feel is home until you brought it to a borrowed home in a borrowed city and did the same thing. Tomorrow, you’ll rerun the same play in a city that was once and will always be a bit of home, though it won’t feel like it’s the whole thing anymore.
You are on the plane there now. Three rows up, a baby is crying so hard it sounds like they’re gargling a squall. Yes, baby. It hurts.
Pacing is good, talking is better, and writing, when you can bear to do it, is best. They all give your thoughts somewhere specific to go, like a pack of dogs being walked together, thick leashes wrapped around a sinewy wrist.
You walk and think and talk and write back to an old you.
You are 26 and you’re heartbroken by romantic love for the first time. There’s a 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. curfew in this country you have no friends in and so you spend the long waking hours taking your pain for laps around the yard, your phone — piped-in infantry — growing hot against your ear. Around the pergola of the house you moved out into, where you don’t notice maggots hatching in the trash, is a matted-down circle of grass the width of your feet. It will grow back, but you won’t be there to see it.
You thought you were heartbroken at 19, when you told a man you loved him and he told you he didn’t want to mess up the connection you two had by dating you. You went to your best friend’s house and laid on her lawn and cried. But that was an imagined love, a chaste one, and neither your body nor your brain nor your heart was in it deep enough to drown. You did write an essay about it, though. Alchemy. You’re doing it again now.
Actually, it wasn’t a man who taught you what a broken heart feels like.
You are 24 and you’re standing at the top of a spiral staircase and a friend you’ve loved for a decade tells you she no longer wants you in her life. It feels like a live wire has gone limp in your hands — like an electric cable that used to supply light to a whole city has been cut. Generators must click on somewhere, they have to, but you can’t see their glow.
You are 22 and you have had a particularly shit day. You tell the friend who has come into the city for your birthday the next day and she doesn’t come over. That’s okay, she’s tired. When you find out she went out with other friends instead, it’s the beginning of the end. Three months later, she leaves you at a bar in a strange city and you don’t get home safe. It took you too long to learn self-preservation, but it will change your life.
You are 15 and you find a list in your best friend’s nightstand (you shouldn’t be looking but that’s beside the point; everyone is drinking downstairs and you go to her room to hide and entertain yourself, and you look). The list is of reasons why she hates you. “She talks about her dead mom too much” is on it. You confront her about it once she’s sober. It does not go well. The things you’ve told her rattle in your head like scrying bones.
Your first heartbreaks are friendships but not all of them are. You have to learn different ways to heal from the romantic kind.
Does that feel unfair?
If you knew how they all ended — every relationship, every friendship — would you do them all again?
Would you still be that way? Open and honest and optimistic?
Would you still love people and yourself and the trick candle inside of you that won’t blow out?
Even when you’d like the darkness?
Would you?
–
You are two weeks shy of 29 and on a first-name basis with heartbreak again because your feelings took you by surprise. You realize you haven’t recognized yourself in weeks.
Your mom used to knit. From her, you know that when you start a big project, you’re supposed to knit a gauge first — a small swatch of stitches to see how your needles and your yarn match the pattern.
You have never made a gauge. You’re not one for patient pre-planning when it comes to relationships. You have tracked your progress along the way — stressed and fretted about it, even — but never slowed down at the start of something to see if it would work.
You get to the joy faster that way. To the deep contentedness of making.
But sometimes it means you need to rip everything out.
–
You are a candle but also a baptismal font. You imagine it within you: the stone basin. The water. People dip their hands into it — so do you — to spread its balm. The water level goes down.
These feel like integral parts of who you are. Water and light.
This is what you tell yourself:
The font will refill. The feet will keep pacing. The pain of ripping out the stitches will not stop you from knitting again.
–
You are 16 and your hands are covered in hot glue. You and your best friend have spent the night making posterboard collages of your friendship: glitter letters and feathers and layers and layers of inside jokes. You’ll keep the collage even after you’ve grown apart. The love is no less beautiful for having ended.
You are 18 and you message your oldest friend when you feel your body’s been taken from you and she helps you put it back, one word at a time. You get through the night, and then the next, and then the next.
You are 19, as of two hours ago. Your party dress is wrinkling on the floor. Your best friend stays up on the futon downstairs after tucking you into her twin bed, texting to check in on you every half hour until you go to urgent care the next morning, driven by the man you will cry about on her lawn come spring.
You are 23 and alone in the Galapagos when a coworker turned best friend sends you $50 on the anniversary of your mom’s death and tells you to do something special. You buy the only cake you can find — carrot, which is a boon, and vegan, which is not — and eat it in a hammock. You send her a picture. You cry but it’s not all sad.
You are 26 when you are rescued by a white knight of a best friend. She takes you to her family and then she is your family. You sleep in the blue-soaked bedroom next to hers and make bags and bags of Muddy Buddies, melting Tollhouse chips over the Chex. You do the same thing the next year, healed, though you do fall waterskiing and get a concussion. She cheers you on before it happens and takes care of you after.
You are turning 27 and you wake up to flowers from a longtime friend, magenta and russet and so, so green. You take them outside and they’re phosphorescent against the wooden deck. Later she makes you a cake as wide as the state it’s named after. It is the best thing you have ever eaten.
26 to 27 is a hard year. Friends and chocolate help. You burn and you learn what this breed of heartbreak is and how to heal from it. You will forget both, later. Or rather, you will remember it askew, like the names of shops across the street from a place you no longer live. There was a hairdresser’s, you think, but what did the sign look like?
You are 28 — the year you started adding “x” to the end of all your text messages — and your friend makes you a Sunday roast the day after you arrive. She doesn’t use a recipe and everything turns out perfect: carrots, soft; beans, snappable; potatoes, crispy, even though you didn’t buy the vat of duck fat she asked for. She doesn’t let you do the dishes. Nine months later, she will take two buses and a train to come hug you in the doorway of another friend’s house. You don’t make it off the red floor runner before crying in her arms.
You are two weeks shy of 29 when your twin-friend calls you home to her. She is home, and it turns out her house is, too: the soft quilted mattress and excellent sheets; the tortoiseshell silverware and thin-rimmed cups; communion every morning, jumping into the pond and taking in the pastel licks of Notting Hill and standing on yoga mats, bodies bent like antennae, wrists flicking the air. You drink a pint with her in the street as a historical guide tells you about ulcers and oysters and shitting out your intestines. As the sun sets across London Bridge, you hold each other and you laugh and laugh and laugh.
–
The steward comes on the PA system to ask everyone to keep the window shades down, but a different screaming kid keeps pulling his up.
(It couldn’t be the first screaming kid; that one hasn’t mastered the use of the hands yet. Wait for it, you think. Wait until you can hold people in return. It helps.)
Light burns across the whole cabin each time the kid touches his shade. It races through the plane like a rumor. Night will come, you know. You can’t outrun it, even though you’re hurtling across the Atlantic. Even though the sun set in London an hour ago and it’ll be white-bright again when you land in New York.
The sky will pull the night across the window eventually, even if you’re not there to see.
You don’t want to outrun it. You don’t need to. You have your own light.
You always have, though sometimes you need the reminder.
x
This piece is inspired by recent art I’ve consumed and been consumed by on the topics of female friendship and love: Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love, Anna Myers’ Where The Light Is newsletter (sign up for it here), and Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho, which is where the photos of text at the end of this essay are from.
1 Comment
Leave your reply.