Notes on Heartbreak

by Annie Lord

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.

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.

Even if I memorised the deep crease of his eyelid, the little scrape through his eyebrow, the way the bone of his nose veers out slightly more to the right, the mole on the bottom right of his skull, they are only memories of my memories of his skin, his eyelids, his moles – far more a reflection of myself than of him. As time wears on, these images will drift further away from the original. Much like how the first statement in a game of Chinese Whispers is progressively bent out of shape.

I thought when I fell in love it wouldn’t be disgusting like it was with other people – we wouldn’t speak in baby voices or force people to walk off the pavement and onto the road because we couldn’t bear to let go of each other’s hands even for a second – but there I was, staring into your eyes because you were more interesting to me than any film we could have chosen to watch. Love feels like cherishing a little yellow duckling in your hands. That’s a disgusting way of describing something, but it turns out love is fucking disgusting.

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.

it. I lived life all over again through him and learned each action’s merit through the response it pulled from his body.

Often in relationships one person clings on tighter than the other. They are afraid they will lose their partner. Meanwhile the partner fears they have lost something infinitely more serious: who they really are.’

When you wake up next to someone every day for years you stop perceiving them in an objective way. You can’t tell what they are because you’ve looked at them for so long, in the same way that a word stops sounding like a word when you repeat it too many times. The closer you get to them the more they turn into this blurry extension of yourself, which is neither beautiful nor ugly, but just a thing that exists beyond measure. Their qualities are invisible to you now and it’s hard to desire something that you cannot gauge.

I don’t agree with Plato’s definition of love and I no longer relate to Aristophanes’ version either. Love is nowhere near as inevitable as he makes out. It’s not the electric reaction when you meet someone. It’s not the 100 times you ring their phone when they’re out late. Or the way you press your nose into their pillow because it smells like them. It’s something you actively choose to do. Not an instinct, but something to nurture. It’s a verb, not a noun. It’s as difficult as a full-time job. It’s extending your world view to encompass theirs. It’s total generosity. It’s doing things even if they won’t notice them. It’s making a fucking massive deal about their birthday. It’s waiting before watching the next episode of something because you said you’d watch it together. It’s trying to be a better person all the time. It’s googling ‘how can you tell if someone’s depressed?’ or ‘what happens when you drink too much caffeine?’ or anything else that might help them with what they’re going through. It’s making those ‘uh-huh’, ‘mmm’ noises when they’re telling a story so they know you’re still listening. It’s challenging them. It’s muting someone on Instagram because you know you’re not looking at their thighs out of curiosity but because you want to be crushed in between them. It’s every time-worn metaphor about the roots of two trees wrapping around one another. It’s laughing at their Simon Cowell impression even though it’s shit. It’s subscribing to one of those flower-del...

‘Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.’