Notes on Heartbreak

by Annie Lord

since I am sad he’d know I’m not in the mood to choke on him,

I message other nearly-sort-of-but-not-quite men and try to build some kind of scaffolding of attention that will prevent me from ever hitting the ground.

There’s all this adrenaline in me; it sparks in my stomach like electricity, it heaves through my lungs. I suppose I’m anxious, but it feels more like anticipation, as though I’m off to a house party later or going on holiday in the morning. I remind myself of what has happened, but I can’t yet feel the solidity of understanding close down around me. All my wires are tangled up.

I wonder if I am focusing on the idea that he kept this secret because the reality of him actually leaving is too big to comprehend. I can’t picture what that would look like. I can see a house without his belongings, I can see me cooking for one, but he’s always there, getting jealous, bumping into me at parties; he always comes back.

I could see the bones of your shoulders poking up through your white shirt. ‘Lion’ said a swirling tattoo on the soft underside of your forearm. I don’t know who calls you that, but you could be one: skin the colour of a well-brewed cup of tea; floppy posh-boy curls; a huge mouth, big enough to fit a fist into, bigger when laughter is falling out of it.

One day you will ask me who the best-looking person I ever met was and I will make up some lifeguard from a family holiday in Wales because it’s embarrassing that the answer is you.

The shelves are covered with things I didn’t like enough to bother to take with me to London, books I’m slightly embarrassed to have read, foundation it took me a long time to admit is too dark for my skin.

eventually I fall asleep and when I wake up there are a few delicious seconds of quiet when I’ve forgotten what’s happened.

Our calves pressed together under the table and it felt as though someone was whisking my insides until they thickened.

I’m scared to tell Granny about Joe, scared that she will forget so that I will have to keep repeating the fact again and again, a fresh wound every time, sticky liquid as another scab is picked away.

I cry until I have a dehydration headache. I cry until my face crumples up like tissue paper and then I take a picture and send it to my friends, and they say, ‘I’ve never seen you look so sad.’ I cry until I can’t remember when it was that I wasn’t crying. I cry until I’ve worked through more tissues than a person with the flu. I cry until I feel as though I might have given myself the flu. I cry until I’m craving salty foods, anchovies, capers, chips, to replace all the electrolytes I’ve lost. I cry until it feels as though I could fill my bedroom with tears, the carpet sodden, squelching under my toes, liquid rising up until I’m paddling in it, wetness creeping up the walls until the paint turns damp and flakes away. I’ll cry until the skin of my calves becomes pruney, until I can swim around the room, until my belongings start to float out of their drawers and my legs strain from doggy-paddling above the wet.

When he’s on his own, even more distraction. The New York Times music podcast on while he crushes garlic under the flat side of a knife, listening to punk or some other genre I don’t get so it won’t remind him of me.

At first there was pain, but there’s not even much of that anymore. Just this dull aching. As though the life is being sucked out of me. I’m so detached from everything it’s like I’m watching the world through FaceTime. I spend most of my time watching endless episodes of things I hate: a Netflix documentary about glassblowing, a history series about Hitler’s failed art career, another documentary called Hannibal: The Man Who Hated Rome.

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 remember reading a line in Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary, which he started writing the day after his mother’s death: ‘I live in my suffering and that makes me happy. Anything that keeps me from living in my suffering is unbearable to me … I ask for nothing but to live in my suffering.’ I too don’t want to escape the suffering; it’s more painful when I try.

‘I’m sorry,’ I tell him. ‘I’m just not really myself right now.’ ‘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.

‘You look great,’ says Mum when she sees my hair. 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.

I start to write a list, but it makes me sad thinking that the bad could replace the good. That the only way we get over things is to imagine they were less than they were.

I’m reminded of a line from a Sharon Olds poem she wrote after her husband divorced her: I guess that’s how people go on, without knowing how.

One evening I was in bed with you. I should have set off to my friend’s house for dinner fifteen minutes before. I was trying to get up, but you kept pulling me back down again. I felt your hands on my back tracing the letters ‘I--l-o-v-e--y-o-u’. I didn’t move. ‘Say it back,’ you told me. I’d had these words in me for so long, I was afraid of them touching the air. I couldn’t let them out right away. ‘Say it,’ you told me again, and I did. ‘I love you.’ I love you. I love you. I love you. 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 tried to reach up to you, running my hands through your hair, but you held them down, crushing my wrists into the pillow. Not being able to do anything might be my favourite thing in the world and you understood that.

I went and got fried chicken and we ate it cross-legged on the bed with tea towels from the kitchen so it felt less gross.

I remember you at university wearing that top. That time I was lying with my legs around you in a room where the radiator was turned up to full and it stank of sex.

I tried to join in their conversations about Brad Pitt getting better with age, how boring one of them found their compulsory Renaissance art course. I listened, I nodded. But I could feel your presence running underneath every moment, like you were a song no one else was listening to.

When I was about to walk out of the door I could hear the girls talking about something in hushed tones. I couldn’t make out any words, but I convinced myself they were talking about me. I walked home with a twisted stomach. I’m just not really into the same things as them anymore, I told myself. Sometimes you drift from people and that’s OK.

Is this what cuckolding is? Getting fucked by another man by the picture he got for his birthday. In the bed we bought on Gumtree together. The sheets from Next I made him transfer half the money for. Would he hate that someone else was in me? Or would it make him feel relieved that I look like I’m doing what moving on is? You have to get under someone to get over them and I’m right under the delivery man, his sweat soaking into my skin.

I’m holding my breath when I walk out of the station. I can’t actually look at him; I worry that if I do I might not be able to hold myself up, deflating like a punctured car tyre. Instead, I divert my eyes to the cashpoint behind him, the hot chocolate he holds out towards me. ‘You didn’t need to get me that,’ I tell him. ‘I know. Just thought you might like it.’

On the way out he playfully slaps my ass and I scream-laugh in response. An old couple who have been eyeing us all evening pinch their lips disapprovingly. I bet they think we’re in the first flushes of love. Really, this is a haggard love. One that’s been torn apart and patched back together. It’s pushing at its stitches. It’s busting out at the seams.

I replied to his last message with a picture of me in the club. The photo is slightly out of focus, my flaws smoothed away in a flurry of movement, lips pulled wider than they really are. He’s seen it but he doesn’t say anything back.

The problem with messages is, the more you send them, the more you want to send another one to correct the one you just sent, but then you want to send another one to correct that one too.

Why is so much of love built out of pretending not to love at all?

My fingers typed the message quickly, moving fast so that my brain didn’t have a chance to stop them from pressing send. It felt good, though, in a bad way. Like smashing a glass against a wall or spitting phlegm out onto the pavement. These past few weeks I’ve been carefully moulding myself into the shape of something he might want again. I took deep breaths when I was with him to stop myself from crying. I shaded under my cheekbones until they looked bigger. I started taking fucking supplements. But like the Incredible Hulk, the real me is breaking out from under her skin and I can’t hold her back.

I feel something breaking in me again. The crazy is a big wave coming and you can’t stop the sea; it tingles down my arms, pours out of my thumbs – they won’t stop hammering against the screen. I type and type and type and then I delete and retype because my phone keeps changing ‘fucking’ to ‘ducking’.

I ring him and he doesn’t pick up. I ring him again and there’s nothing but my breath crackling against the speaker. When he finally answers I’m even worse over the phone. I just keep shouting ‘Fuck!’ and ‘When did I start to hate myself so much?’ I call him a coward for giving up on us, a fucking coward.

‘I’m not sure you want to know.’ He said that before. And I said it too when Joe asked where a mark on my leg was from. He repeats it later on when I ask who the girl he’s seeing is. I will say it again when he asks what gym the delivery man goes to. ‘I’m not sure you want to know.’ 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. We call it ‘setting boundaries’, making ‘ground rules’ to ensure whatever it is that we are doing is easier. It’s what polyamorous people do, those in open relationships; it’s what people do to reduce harm. But we like creating these boundaries a little too much, watching the bricks being cemented on top of one another, rising up higher and higher until we stand on either side of a very high wall.

His chest is mottled with red patches from where blood has rushed upwards from desire.

‘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?

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. So much of the ending was passively letting things happen; hate pushes me off my seat and says, Show him what you’re made of.

You’d think in these circumstances I’d think about him less, but at this point he’s on my mind almost constantly, like this bit of food stuck in my teeth that I can’t get out, that is giving me a headache from the way I curl my tongue around to try to get at it. I imagine this is because when humans experience grief they can’t process the pain all in one go. It comes in waves. That’s why there’s denial at first, then guilt, then anger and bargaining, and then there’s depression when you finally start to work through what happened.

‘I feel so aimless nowadays,’ I tell my friend Hannah. ‘What do you mean?’ I try to explain the sensation but it’s difficult. How many times I go to have a bath, or for a walk, and stop halfway through; turning off the hot tap or pulling the laces back out of my shoes. I can’t stop thinking about how there’s no one there to know that I’ve gone for a bath, or for a walk, and as a result the act of doing one of those things, anything, starts to feel completely pointless. So I turn off the tap or I take off my shoes and curl up at the bottom of the bed, held in a sort of paralysis where all I can do is slide my thumb up and down the screen of my phone.

Earlier on I mentioned a study which found that people in love adjust their breathing and movement in order to match that of their partners. But I missed out that it is usually the woman who adjusts to the man. He stays the same.

Women are never just women, they’re the men they prop up and save.

He has the easy charm that the best man at a wedding always does.

What if I wasn’t so forward, maybe he would have felt like he needed to work for me more? What if I hadn’t said that weird insensitive thing about paracetamol? What if he didn’t like the way my kisses left lip gloss all over him? I thought he would get rid of my what ifs but he just brought me more of them.

I get a strange sense of pride from saying that I’m going somewhere my ex-boyfriend will be because part of me still gains self-esteem from my proximity to a man, even if it’s one I’m no longer with.

There’s no one more beautiful than the woman who has taken a man from you. You want to possess her because in doing so you would possess what he possesses and be closer to him again. Perhaps if I slept with her it would resolve all the feelings of jealousy because then I’d have taken what took him from me.