Notes on Heartbreak

by Annie Lord

‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,’ said Kate Moss, supposedly. But being skinny doesn’t feel that good at all. It doesn’t feel like anything.

As though curves meant also having curves on your stomach, not just on your boobs and your bum.

Before you, I thought you only got love if you were skinny, but you can have your cake and eat it and have a man too.

I was better at losing weight with you as my end goal.

I’m not sure if you loved me so much that I always looked good to you. Or if you loved me so much you’d tell me I looked good even when I didn’t.

I have a to-do list and I enjoy crossing out tasks from it so much that sometimes I write things I’ve already done just so that I can enjoy the satisfaction of striking through them.

After a couple of weeks I start calling working out ‘training’, although what I’m training for isn’t a sport.

I crunch my existence down to a series of numbers: 10,334 steps, 2,054 calories, an average of 53 minutes in the gym each visit, 25 trips so far this month, 4 sets of 12 with a 20kg weight. Waist 29cm. Chest 36cm. Thigh 24cm. It’s as though I am an equation and if all these numbers add up correctly, I can be solved.

I let myself imagine what sort of person I will become in this body, in that dress.

Everyone will roll their eyes because they worry that he’s bad for me because I’m one of those chaotic beautiful people who makes bad decisions.

I worked to mould myself into another shape and I thought everything would change, but nothing did. I was the exact same funny but not hilarious, good-looking but not beautiful, clever but not intelligent person I always was.

It feels good for a while, but I know in a few months, when I’ve put the weight back on, I’ll begin thinking that things would be better if I was skinny

Nerves have made me so aware of myself I feel like someone’s watching us on a surveillance camera. I can’t remember how people walk when they’re not thinking about walking.

But I’m sick of myself and all the people I meet who are

Then I think about how pathetic it is that I’m so willing to discard the picture if this man who I’ve just met doesn’t like it.

I wonder what would happen if we liked each other enough to stick around to see what it takes to make each other really happy.

When he reversed, he’d put his hand behind my seat in that way that’s so inexplicably hot it makes your crotch turn to pudding.

But chances are I would never take him to Arsenal, and I would never meet his mum. There were too many things I liked that he didn’t. I couldn’t see the world how he saw it.

‘You don’t need to go all the way back there. You don’t need to know why he made this dumb decision. You just need to know that it was dumb.’

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.’

But I like it when he tells me what to do so I eat the crusts slowly, lazily, a kid who knows there’s no pudding without eating the green vegetables. ‘Good,’ he says when I’ve finished, and from those words I can see that part of him is enjoying what losing him has done to me. The havoc it’s wreaked on my body. He loves how much I love him. I am a vessel for him to see his own perfection. What Virginia Woolf meant when she said women are looking glasses that reflect the image of man back at twice their natural size. This shouldn’t be something I want, but I want anything that brings him closer to me.

That to have power you have to have someone to be powerful over. That’s what I am for him. I bend so that he can climb on my back and stand taller. In that way I make the power. Really, it is mine. If I said no, there would be nothing. No one would ascend and we would both be crawling around on the floor. But I want him to be tall, so I think about becoming the carpet he sinks his toes into. The table he rests his feet on. Everything is a yes. I am one enormous big fat walking yes. Shame or embarrassment – ‘I don’t think I can do that’ – becomes me doing that very thing on a plate. I stretch out, I open up. I fit more of him in my mouth than I ever have before. I spit and gag. I roll over. He says, ‘Jump,’ and I say, ‘How high?’ and together we reach the stars.

I love her laugh. It sounds like winning.

Susan Sontag wrote in her diaries that her mother led her to believe that ‘I love you’ means ‘I don’t love anyone else’.

Jess didn’t ever get annoyed, she just stopped asking what I was up to. We never got back to how we were before. Maybe this was my first break-up.

‘He still wants to see me!’ I say to Moll, walking into her room without knocking. ‘He wasn’t getting my messages because he broke his phone!’

But I can’t do that because to make him want me, I have to make him feel as though he’s losing me. Why is so much of love built out of pretending not to love at all?

These past few weeks I’ve been carefully moulding myself into the shape of something he might want again.

I don’t want him to have the satisfaction of knowing I’d prefer to be nearer to him than further away.

But I can’t bear to show him how much I still need him.

We pretend it’s a kindness, that we’re stopping each other from hearing things that might hurt the other, but really it’s a way of showing that there are parts of us that are out of reach now, where before they got everything.

I want him to open up his big mouth like a wolf and devour me until there’s nothing left except the stains I’d leave on his T-shirt.

We want the other to swallow us up into them so we no longer know who we are.

Want me down to the marrow … Sign my death with your teeth. We love, we fall into the jaws of the fire. We can’t escape it.

excitement comes in at the boundary between wanting to be eaten and wanting to survive. This is the...

I’m not sure how much I can bear his lips, how much of me would disappear into them, down his throat. How it would feel to continue to live in the world through him, how much of me would be left if he spat me back out.

It feels so good that my knees buckle but I hate that it feels good because that means he’s made her feel this good too.

I don’t want to be a ‘yes’ for him anymore, the chair he rests his feet on, but I like it when I am. I like it when he stands all over me. ‘Stand up straight,’ he says, because I’m sinking down the wall, but I don’t because I want him to tell me to do something again.

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 can feel him drawing away. I try to say things that will bring him back.

I get dressed slowly, just in case I hear a ‘wait’,

We enjoyed performing these roles because they weren’t real yet. We were just learning how to be in a relationship by copying what we saw everywhere else, like kids playing Mummies and Daddies at nursery.

‘What else could he be doing? Am I really that far down his priority list? Does he have any respect for me at all?’

‘I literally feel sick now, I get so anxious for when he’s going to message and when he does I get this rushing excitement and then I open it and I feel shit again.’

‘He’s not worth it,’ that’s what they always say. But why do so many things seem to be worth more than women’s anger?

The way he tries to take control of what’s happening when I’m the one saying he needs to take it away.

Our love sank to that deeper place where there’s no mystery and you know what the other person is thinking even when their back is turned. It was like having a favourite coat that you want to wear every single day because it’s better than all of your other coats. It was like having your best friend there all the time.

And my life would start to seem all right, nice even, because when I told you things they seemed to rest more lightly on my shoulders because you held them on yours too.

‘I’m just saying I reckon you’d be happier in relationships, and in life, if you centred yourself more. Then you won’t have to rely on someone else for quite so much of your happiness. You’ll walk because you want to walk, not because he says a walk will be a nice thing. You can feel full with your own experiences and then you probably won’t even feel like you want a boyfriend.’

Love isn’t a night class, though, is it? It shouldn’t just be about self-optimisation. ‘Be your own best friend,’ they say, as if satisfaction means overcoming the feeling of loneliness, because apparently this emotion is not a logical result of the fact that humans are social animals but a defect that can be eliminated if you spend enough time focusing on hobbies.