Notes on Heartbreak

by Annie Lord

Then his hand would loop around my neck and pull me down, and I’d collapse like something that was already breaking.

Except he wasn’t there that night, because he really did end our five-year relationship on the side of the road at King’s Cross station. And he really did break my heart. It feels like the worst act of betrayal in the world, to have the one who’s meant to help get rid of my pain be the one making it.

and something in my chest snaps; the separate halves of it drift apart like rubbish in the ocean caught by two different tides.

But just because you know the name of a flower doesn’t mean you understand what it is to be one.

Broken-heart syndrome is a dangerous disorder that causes chest pain, breathlessness and low blood pressure. Most patients recover, but research shows that the condition can scar and weaken the heart muscles. It is known formally as takotsubo cardiomyopathy. The medical world recognises it as a temporary condition where sudden emotional upset or other physical stress can cause the apical ballooning of the heart’s left ventricle. It distorts and enlarges so that it’s narrowed at the top and swells outwards at the bottom. The Japanese word ‘takotsubo’ is the name of an octopus trap with a similar form. The octopus can get into the circular trap, but there’s not enough room for it to manoeuvre itself to turn around and get out.

I like to measure my tears too. To see my suffering quantified, categorised.

Tears flush out adrenocorticotropic hormones, which cause high stress levels, so that you feel calmer, while also triggering the release of natural opiate leucine enkephalin, which reduces pain and improves mood. That’s why you feel such an abounding looseness when the tears have all come out, like a blow-up bed drained of air.

A lot of the time the only way to withstand pain is to poeticise it, imagine it as something beautiful, unparalleled. Why suffer for something ordinary?

Do you hear me crying from where you sleep at night?

My brain was always slower than yours, but you always waited for it to catch up.

You’d think departure would be a quiet sound, but it’s not, it’s noisy. His absence talks to me. I hear him like people with phantom limb syndrome can feel pain where their body part used to be.

I wonder if it was the opposition of our two halves that made me feel so complete when I was with him? Because together we encompassed everything, a whole universe of planets and moons and black holes and stars and comets burning through the atmosphere.

I learned to breathe in time with the rhythm of his lungs. He turned over in bed and I turned over too. When we were together it was hard to tell where he ended and I began. It wasn’t always like that, but as each year went by our perspectives became closer and closer until he would say ideas at dinner parties, not even knowing it was me that said them first, and I would say ‘I’ but mean ‘we’. ‘I don’t think abstract art is my kind of thing’; ‘I’m not sure I can be bothered to hear other political views’; ‘I’m not going to go to that birthday, I think I’ll have more fun at that other party.’ Now he’s gone I am condemned to spend the rest of my life missing this other arm and leg, feeling like a half-formed thing.

Being here should be a distraction, but I don’t know if you can distract from something like this. Turning away from the hurt, I only feel its influence more. Like the pain is saying, Look at me while I am talking to you.

‘I know,’ he says, and for a moment I think about how lucky I am to have people who love me so much they will let me hate them just in case it helps.

hit me like a truck.

Sometimes I try to think of a future without him, but it’s like trying to imagine a new colour.

The pain of her being so unthinkingly kind is like a stomach ache. I want to keel over and hold my knees because her love is so limitless it comes back over and over again, even after I’ve spat in its face.

In the poem, Carson remembers a conversation she has with her mum in the kitchen: You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down? I don’t want to put it down either. I want to hold onto it until my hand burns. Until the skin peels away in flakes.

One school of scientists believes that memories are not singular occurrences that we return to, but rather endless repetitions of that memory and the memory of that memory and that memory and so on. There is no stable ‘memory fragment’, or what is often called a ‘trace’; instead, we create a new ‘trace’ each time to house the thought. Meaning each memory is a mere copy of a copy, each one a more distant reconstruction of the first.

The word ‘baby’ stopped being disgusting.

I love you. I still do. I’ll try my best to forget, but I think I’ll love you for all my life.

I was so secure in this love, I thought that he would forgive me for each and every one of those mistakes, but soon they all piled up and there were too many of them and all these tiny ones were enough for him to say, ‘I want to be on my own.’

How funny that the best person to help you through a break-up is most likely the one who did it to you. Only they know what really happened, just like how your siblings are the only people who know how fucked up your upbringing was and therefore the only ones you can tolerate passing judgement on it.

I was so worried about all the mistakes I made, but now I see that they are the most special part. They mean we wanted each other at our worst.

I’m turning inside out, warming up, I open up like a flower, he loves me, he loves me not. I turn to him and each of my petals fall off because I thought love was fullness but right now it feels like an obliteration, like burning out into nothing – white heat, purple flames and then it’s gone.

I gave him my arms and my legs and he ran away with them and I don’t know how to get them back.

When I saw her I also saw Danny. When she saw me she also saw Joe. And we bore the weight of our other halves’ flaws. Women are never just women, they’re the men they prop up and save.

In that kebab shop past and future collided between us through a language that no one else understood the logic of. There’s no other person you could say that to who would enjoy or understand it. So saying it was almost the same as saying I only need you.

I think this again when I’m listening to the relationship therapist Esther Perel’s podcast Where Should We Begin?

What if, what if, what if. Knowing what went wrong between us doesn’t make me feel better. It encourages the small, noisy part of myself that’s always saying I should have tried harder.

I feel trapped by this man, as if he’s taken me hostage by my own morals.

This is the central paradox of love: it longs for closeness but the more you achieve it, the less you value what you’re attaching yourself to.

Esther Perel discusses this issue in her book, Mating in Captivity. Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness. One does not exist without the other. With too much distance, there can be no connection.

If there is no distance to transcend then there is, essentially, no one to connect with anymore. So, as alien as it may sound to us, remaining separate and individual is a condition for connection. Perel calls this ‘the essential paradox of intimacy and sex’.

‘We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.’

Instead of being the defining feeling that dictates my life, heartbreak starts to become something ordinary that I just have to endure, a sensation like those others – granted, one I will have to endure for longer, but no more or less exceptional.

And it’s through this inner dialogue that you become conscious of yourself as someone you can talk to and have a relationship with. I look at her now in that mirror and she’s me and I am her, and although we’re the same thing I see that we can talk to each other even if I will always know what’s coming because she, her, me, is the only thing I can count on to be there for the whole of my life. And in the towel now, with coldness starting to prick up all the hairs on my arms, and the sheets dark with damp, I experience another ‘over’, and this time it’s a promise, to keep on being nice to her. To order expensive takeaways, and go on walks, and watch films that are difficult to understand, because this life could be gorgeous if only I gave myself permission to allow it.

Then I tell him what went wrong. The way that love can make people want to grip on to each other so tight that they have to pull apart before they hurt each other anymore.

You were in the shower when I stormed in, and for a moment all my anger softened because after all I loved you so much my heart felt like a bruise.

I thought a proper shower meant we were grown-ups.

Men say women aren’t funny and I think that’s because they need a badum-bum-tish punchline; they don’t see that the humour is riddled through everything we say, so that everyone’s always laughing a little bit. Most of the time we talk through the language of experiences, a few too many of them painful, and we find our way to those hurts and tug them out of each other, like following the trail of a map we didn’t know was already inside us.

Things can happen without you there and you will miss out. But it might give you the strength to be fully there for something else that happens another day.

Most things that take a long time to make can be enjoyed for a long time too. Like a book with many pages or a big house. But food isn’t like that. What takes hours is gone in a moment. Knowing that I took all that time just for a few minutes of pleasure – my pleasure – well, it shows how deserving I think the person eating it is. I’ve always known how to say I love you with food, and by making this food, and making the effort to do all the parts of the recipe that are normally quite boring and time-consuming, I was saying ‘I love you’ to myself. I love you. I love you. I love you. I will try to make sure I do for the rest of my life.

Knowing I’ve learned all these lessons reassures me because I know that even if we’ve reached the end, I can’t ever forget him, because how can you forget something that’s in the way you move, talk, breathe?

I was hurt when he left because I didn’t know who I was going to be when this person, who contributed so much to my composition as a human, disappeared. What I didn’t realise is that he taught me all the lessons and I know them off by heart without him now. So, as much as I’m glad that he made me who I am, I’m glad that I’ve been left alone to be her too.

Perhaps Joe and I can carry on loving each other, even when miles of air and experience separate us. Not in the way of wanting to wake up in the same bed. Or needing to speak to each other when something goes wrong. But as a quiet love that endures out of respect for the impact he had on my life.

Perhaps no one ever forgets anyone. We keep parts of them inside us forever and they come out in the moments we need them. Like ghosts who can’t find their way to the afterlife.

At dinner we play this fun game we made up called Guess the Tupperware. It started one evening when Dad claimed, with genuine pride and admiration, ‘Your mother has a great eye for the right-sized box for leftovers.’ So now when she heads off to get the Tupperware from the drawer, Dad and I begin a drumroll. It starts off slow but as she approaches we get louder, until we’re banging on the table like we are in the pub watching a football cup final. She tries to pack all the food away but this time she’s misjudged it; the carbonara needs an additional, slightly smaller box. And in response Dad and I hurl insults at her like lunatics.

Releasing each other might have been our greatest act of love.

I told myself there was too much of him in me and me in him for us to ever fully forget each other. But there we were, walking at different paces, heading in different directions. He’s handed me back my arm and my leg and in return I’ve given him back the same. What’s left in the end? Not even the charred ground after a volcano, the ruin of a battlefield, just empty sentences and good manners. What hurts more than missing him is realising I no longer do.