If you’re lucky in life, one day someone will sit across from you and break your heart.
Six years. Four countries. Thousands of dollars in mobile phone bills and plane tickets. An endless stream of tears. A hard drive full of pictures. Memories like unstrung pearls, scattered and pointless. So many words said and unsaid. All those things you can’t give back or get back, including your youth. All those lies you told yourself and all those harsh truths you told the other. All the things you gave for love. All those things you lost in the fire.
When you’re young, it’s easier to pop back up after the wave crashes over you and thrusts you down towards the reef below. It’s a pain but it’s also a rush. Older, you leave the surf aching and a little less sure it’s worth going back out there in the hopes of catching that one special wave. At any rate, you kind of suspect that if you find it, it might end up killing you.
For the most part, no one likes to or should wear their heart on their sleeve in this town. Too many people will have too much to say about it. This isn’t New York. You can’t return that SPAM-colored typewriter that lanky loose-hearted poet gave you, walk down some subway steps and disappear from a shared world forever. Here, pain lingers, because when you least expect it, someone will mention that person who blew you apart, tell you where they are and what they are doing. Usually they are doing well. Sometimes they even become president. And even if they are dead or incarcerated, it doesn’t solve anything anyway. Another person’s story doesn’t change the course of yours, unless it is intertwined with it.
I spent my twenties wandering, certain that the next place and hopeful that the next person would magically untangle that severely tangled skein of experiences which made me, well, me. We’d run off together and, on the strength of 100-percent pure love, clean the slate of our bad experiences and construct a brand-spanking-new future for ourselves. You think like that when you’re a little artistic and when you’re just that little bit too messed up. You think like that when you’ve spent most of your life imagining you know what people are actually thinking, rather than figuring it out by really listening to what they are saying, even if it is not what is actually coming out of their mouths.
Relationships are economic, political, in all the senses of those words. I didn’t know that.
People tell you a lot of things in the aftermath of a breakup. The words fall like rain on a tin roof. It makes for quite a racket but none of it penetrates. You’re just sitting there, drenched in sorrow, cold and alone. The thing is, you’ve done the stupidest thing in the world with the very best of intentions — you’ve let that compelling wolf into the chicken coop, handed the keys to your heart to precisely the person you shouldn’t have given them to. And that’s no one’s fault, not his, not hers, not even yours. People change, constantly and, suddenly, without warning, permanently. You are no longer the person for them, and promises be damned. They are not worth the paper they are written on or, for that matter, the bright clear diamond they rested upon.
So what then?
Eventually the rain stops. No one wants to talk about it. No one wants to hear about it. There’s really nothing special about you or your heartbreak, nothing to differentiate your experience from that of the person crying next to you, except the quality of the lighting in the restaurant you had it in. Life goes on and you better get with the program. Modern life is relentless. It will leave you gaping in the dust, if you don’t try to run alongside it, burst your lungs trying to keep up with it.
If you’re like me you can sit there forever. Movement hurts. But at some point something pushes you out into the sunshine — a latent competitive streak, the urge to buy a pretty dress and have someone see you in it or the lure of a place you haven’t yet seen or a person you have not yet been. Sometimes it’s just the realization that you’re dry, even your cheeks, though, sadly, maybe even your heart.
You get on the bus. And as you take your seat, you take a look around at all the other people. Everyone’s walking-wounded and if they aren’t now, they were once. If you haven’t experienced profound disappointment in life, been edified then insulted, raised up and then dashed, then, in a way, you’re not part of all this humanity. And you realize that in a way you’re lucky. Some people don’t ever get to lose a love of their life or experience the slow dissolution of a dream. An end presupposes a beginning. A failure only comes after a try.
And you realize that you’re lucky, because some time in your life, someone sat across from you, reached out and crushed your heart. And, as he put it as he walked away, “You’ll live.â€