Notes on Heartbreak

by Annie Lord

I’d sit thinking about it for a while because my body is so closed off from me sometimes, as though I’m living in the same house as someone I no longer talk to.

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.

There’s something so hot about someone referring to you by your full name. It reminds me of being told off by a teacher.

I thought I knew everything he was thinking, which friends he was annoyed with, the consistency he liked his porridge. I should have known he was about to break up with me. We always made decisions as a team. Maybe that’s why he did it, because he wanted to start making decisions all on his own.

Fighting the pain is tiring, so eventually I fall asleep and when I wake up there are a few delicious seconds of quiet when I’ve forgotten what’s happened.

When it’s time to go I feel guilty because I’ve wanted to leave for a while. It never seems as though you’ve stayed for long enough.

‘Everything is so sharp when you are young,’ she smiled. ‘When you’re old like me you might even miss feeling this bad.’

If he never cries, does that mean his grieving process never ends or does it mean he never grieves at all?

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?

I try to think of a new way of expressing my love, but it seems all the ways have already been taken.

When I walked away from Joe after he told me we were over, I felt incomplete, like I had left something behind – my card maybe, or my phone. An object of importance that it would be difficult to function without. I patted my pockets, dug my fingers into them, but I could feel my phone, my travelcard, the things I needed. I still felt wrong. When I got to the station, I thought about going back and checking the pavement, but I thought that if I had dropped anything it probably would have been taken by someone else by now.

He did things because he really believed in them, I do things because they will make me look better.

‘Want me to get you a plate?’ my parents ask, hoping the act of holding a knife and fork might remind me of how I used to move through the world before he told me it was over.

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.

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.

Not doing requires more concentration than doing. You have to focus on it because, if you relax for even a second, your thumb might text him without your brain ever granting permission.

‘When my first boyfriend Michael broke up with me, I would have chopped my arm off and given it to him if it meant he would stay with me.’

‘Thing is, I didn’t even like him that much when we were together. I just didn’t like that he was the one who made the final decision to end things.’

We both laugh and it feels strange to feel my face pull in a direction that isn’t downwards.

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

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.

Because I stuck to all the rules. I became a ghost and he didn’t miss me when I disappeared.

‘I like that you don’t just pretend to get things you don’t get. You’re probably smarter for not getting them, you know? Like, this looks cool, but I’m not sure it means much, but I’d try to make out that it did. You’re very honest.’

How can she no longer see the man she went mad for?

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 wanted to do more but I couldn’t because this wasn’t cheating. It was just us being inappropriate.

That the only way we get over things is to imagine they were less than they were.

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.

It was funny arguing about whether or not it had happened back then in the supermarket, because I had already won. He was mine anyway, so it didn’t really matter either way. But now it feels humiliating that something so pivotal to my idea of us could be built out of lies. I don’t like this perspective. So when it hits me it’s red in my mind. I push it back until it fades to black and then I fill the emptiness with the colours of another love story.

I helped hide his actions from him because I wanted him to keep committing them.

And as I’m walking to my room I realise I didn’t think of Joe throughout the whole of dinner. And I only think of him now because I force myself to. Just to make sure it still hurts.

Why do I sit here holding onto us until my hand bleeds? Why should I alone shoulder the burden of memory when he is so quick to throw it away?

I guess that’s how people go on, without knowing how.

I’ve come to think of my ‘self’ – my personality – as an entity that collapses when I am alone and unperceived by others; but then, as if by magic, when I am with other people, my ‘personality’ reassembles itself.

Coming away from you felt like pulling off a wax strip. It was something I had to force. It didn’t feel natural. I wouldn’t be surprised if leaving you made my skin come out in hives.

But I could feel your presence running underneath every moment, like you were a song no one else was listening to.

Parts of me slip away. I don’t mind watching them leave.

I feel amputated without those other parts of me. I need to fit with someone else so that I feel whole again. That filled to the brim feeling that is love. Water pouring over a cup. Failing that, I hope these men can give me something to fill up the gaps, an inch, a quarter.

But I have safely compartmentalised the guilt in a part of my brain I have no quick access to. If anything would make me feel better right now, I’d do it.

Reply constantly for forty-eight hours to measure how weird they are; if you haven’t organised a date by the end of that time it will most likely never happen and you’ll turn into pen pals who only message when self-esteem is low.

I’m getting so good at this now. I mould around men like cake mixture sinking into a baking tray. Give them my arms and legs and, like a shop assistant, ask them: ‘Are these all right for you or would you like to try them in a different size?’

When my granny married my grandpa she stopped going to church. He didn’t ask her to as far as anyone knows. Maybe he just didn’t think that stuff was important and so she stopped thinking it was important too, because men are meant to be the most important thing in our lives, so what they don’t value starts to feel insignificant. Maybe that’s why she didn’t go and sit on that pew near all the cold stone and the big windows in her nice stiff skirt. She didn’t sing or run her fingers over the buttery leather binding of the Bible in her hands. Instead, she went to the rugby with him, wearing two pairs of tights to keep warm, and then she brought Welsh rarebit and home-baked cakes to him on a tea trolley and they ate them in front of the telly. She probably didn’t even realise she was losing her religion.

That’s the thing with revelations: they come and then you ignore what they show you and continue on in the way you behaved before.

I think about how unfortunate it is that I’ve nearly emptied the plate and how sad I am that it would be socially unacceptable to order a second one.

Sometimes I hide this information under my fingers, telling myself if I don’t see the number it won’t go into me. In restaurants I’m always the one asking, ‘Are we getting starters?’ The one who’s disappointed when everyone answers the question ‘Pudding?’ with, ‘Shall we get one to share?’ I’m so excited to eat things I put them in my mouth when they are too hot to enjoy.

I like putting enough ketchup on things that you can’t taste what it’s coating. I use crisps like edible spoons.

But now that he’s dumped me I don’t eat. I actually don’t even want to. Feeding myself has become a function, like brushing my teeth or clipping my toenails. Trying not to think of him takes so much effort there’s no room in my brain for anything else. He’s the best diet I’ve ever been on.

I was always useless at sticking to the rules. I didn’t eat less, I just pushed food into these weird dark corners. While waiting for the kettle to boil I’d throw down the cold chips someone had left on the side after a night out, eat three bowls of cereal in a row. If I broke a rule, I couldn’t stop. Once I’d seen that this whole moral checklist was completely made up and so easily breakable, I couldn’t keep myself from extending entirely beyond its limits. So when I ate a digestive biscuit I had to finish the whole packet.

This lack of appetite should be a relief. It was tiring thinking about food as much as I did. A few times I tried to go back to how it was before the first diet when I would just eat when I was hungry and not eat when I wasn’t. It didn’t work. If I relaxed the rules I’d end up binge-eating and then after that guilt would make me go back on the diet again. I would dream of ways out of the cycle, be jealous of those I thought already had such an escape.

‘It’s difficult for me to put on weight.’ She had daily injections to lessen the symptoms of this disorder and I couldn’t understand why she’d give up the ability to never put on weight. ‘Because I’m tired all the time,’ she said, and then held out her hand so I could see the tremor the hyperthyroidism gave her. I knew it was wrong, but to me, staying thin still seemed like something worth keeping.