Out of Love

by Hazel Hayes

It won’t last. You can’t keep it. No more than you could keep the spark that lights a flame. But you remember it with every ending; that moment, before it all began, before your perfect creation was made imperfect by logistics and limitations.

He stopped loving me a long time ago but wasn’t brave enough to tell me.

My laughter sounded odd in the empty apartment.

I wanted those heels to remind him of the time I wore them for him with red lingerie. And now I want him to imagine me wearing them for someone else. And I want that thought to cut him. I haven’t been with anyone else, as it happens. That night—like most nights lately—I got into bed and cried,

I did go on a date, but that was just an attempt to convince myself that I’m okay, which is ironic, really, because it only served to prove that I’m very much not.

I want him to drop to his knees and beg to be allowed back into my life. Not because I want him back, mind you—I’m through the worst of it now and I know that getting back together would be an insult to all I’ve been through—I just want to know that he knows he won’t survive without me.

his shelf was completely bare save for a few rings of dust around vacant circular spots, which at least confirmed that I hadn’t just imagined him.

It’s just an iron. It’s just stuff. I’m just heartbroken. It’s just my heart.

That’s the problem with breakups, though. It’s not just two people saying good-bye and going their separate ways; it’s the excruciating process of untangling two lives, picking them apart like some sad surgical procedure, trying to detach this thing from that while causing as little lasting damage as possible.

people want to see their sadness reflected back at them because it makes them feel connected to something and connection is the best salve for sadness.

Coming back to myself, to my body, feels like coming home, only to no home I’ve ever known.

Beginning inside me and radiating outward was an overwhelming sense of wholeness, and fullness, and joy. It was as if I could feel my heart knitting back together, strand by strand, and the sensation was at once odd and painful and deeply satisfying; a healing pain.

I had known he was capable of doing this. I was just too naive and too arrogant to believe he would do it to me. We all think we’ll be different, don’t we?

I lay in bed, hands on my chest in some sort of weird attempt to grab on to my own heart and hold it together—I was sure it was literally ripping apart inside me.

every moment, good or bad, is steeped in sadness for a while. Even the nice moments, the achievements and successes, are tinged with the knowledge that someone or something is missing.

Eventually, loving someone becomes muscle memory.

Right now, what I most want to do is write a book, but I know I will never be celebrated for doing so in the same way I would be for having a child. One wonders whether, if one were to push said book out one’s vagina, it might be received with greater fanfare.

“Crazy is the space between what they tell you and what you know is true.”

He looks at me, and my heart aches at the memory of his dark eyes staring down at me the first time we made love. It’s not that he can’t see me now, it’s more like he can see me, but I’m spoiling his view.

I hang up before the part where we’d usually say “I love you,” knowing somehow that he won’t.

I watched as my family touched her hands and kissed her forehead and whispered good-byes into her ear, and I marveled at the love they still seemed to feel for her dead body. Not only could I not find love for it; I resented it, this thing that looked like her but wasn’t her.

My usual information-gathering instinct was useless in this case—no matter how much I learned about death, she’d still be gone and I’d still be grieving—and so, having rejected religion at a young age, I found myself wishing for the comfort blanket that is faith.

The result was that I craved him—his time, his attention, his touch—I was physically craving connection with him, and I thought coming here would fix that. But sitting in front of him in that bar, I felt farther from him than ever before.

wondering if he’s ever coming home, or if I even want him to.

This is the moment I know that Theo has fallen out of love with me.

I’d rather be loved and loathed in equal measure than for everyone to just tolerate me.

But there’s this paradox with relationships, isn’t there? The more time you’ve spent trying to make it work, the more time you’re willing to keep spending, trying to make it bloody work.

“I love you so fucking much that . . . it’s not very nice sometimes. It’s horrible, actually. I think about losing you and it’s like someone’s standing on my chest. You could break me. If you wanted to. You could absolutely fucking break me.”

“Come on,” I say finally. “Let’s go home.”

There’s nothing like saying good-bye to a place to make you want to stay. Everywhere I look I see memories I’ve made, good and bad, and it hurts. I feel as though I’ve been afflicted by some rare disease that renders me incapable of seeing an object, place, or person for what it is right now, and instead forces me to remember what it has been or wonder what it might become in my absence.

For better or for worse, I am my mother’s daughter, and her story is my story too. It’s mine to carry, mine to hold—with love if I can manage it—and mine to weave into my own.

This is the moment I know that Theo has fallen in love with me.

We are both wounded in our own way and, like a pair of tectonic plates shifting over time, our wounds will gradually grate against one another’s, causing damage at a glacial pace. Neither one of us will notice until it’s too late.

I find it incredibly endearing how much pleasure he takes in sharing these songs, which clearly mean so much to him. Suddenly I feel an overwhelming urge to be let further into his world.

Moments later, we’re making love again, wordlessly, almost soundlessly, while a storm rages outside. And so the winter passes with little regard for us. It lashes at our windows and freezes our fingertips and toes each time they venture outside the covers, where we remain, nestled in one another, making love and promises in the dark.