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They say it takes half the length of a relationship to get over its ending. Has anyone managed to get over it in a night? I want to wake up out of a coma two and a half years from now having missed the entire thing.
If words are dead ends, then metaphors are doors that I can try to open up. When you compare pain to another thing, those that are listening can fill in the abstraction with their own interpretations. My friend’s pain was a bowling ball and mine is something like a tarantula who’s using my body as her nest. I can feel her pulling up my oesophagus, the lump of her body balancing at the edge of my throat. I swallow her down, but eight legs means she works her way back up again quickly. Fighting the pain is tiring, so eventually I fall asleep and when I wake up there are a few delicious seconds
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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.
In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes, a famous Greek theatre and comedy writer, explains the myth of soulmates. According to Aristophanes, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate halves, condemning us to spend the rest of our lives looking for that other part. According to Aristophanes, love is the pursuit of that lost wholeness.
Why is so much of love built out of pretending not to love at all?
Love turns us all into cannibals, or that’s what French feminist Hélène Cixous says in her essay ‘Love of the Wolf’. 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.
At this point hate sustains me. I need it in order to persuade myself to keep moving through this world, to remind my lungs to breathe.
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.
And at that moment, I felt the paradox of love, long before I heard Esther Perel’s definition of it. This sense of unease that no matter how hard I try I will never truly be satisfied. Everything in the world is so at odds with itself and humans need all these unhappy contradictions in order to exist. No one likes getting out of bed, but if you never did, you’d be sad. Exercise feels awful but improves your mood. Love makes you want security, but when you get it, it’s boring.
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.
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.
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.
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.
