Notes on Heartbreak

by Annie Lord

Or perhaps I was so perfect that it made him think it was time to cut me out before he hurt me more than was necessary.

I’ll tell you that I couldn’t stop giggling at everything you said. You’ll say, I know. You’ll say you thought I was hot, though.

There are another sixty-four adjectives to choose from. I keep looking for the right one, but each time they escape me, like when you turn around to try to see your own shadow. I find that too often words fall short, reducing the overwhelming swell of feeling to an isolated sensation as though it was just one thing and not all of you at that moment.

I get under the duvet and scream into my pillow until it’s wet with spit. I thrash until the sheet comes off the corner of the bed. And there’s that pain again, wriggling out from under the strength of my descriptions.

But just because you know the name of a flower doesn’t mean you understand what it is to be one.

For a moment I thought I heard you say, ‘I-love-you,’ but you were just saying, ‘How could you?’ because I nicked a chip from your pile. I imagined the words I wanted to hear being swallowed up with the grease sinking down your gut. At least then they would get to live on in your stomach.

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. The medical world recognises it as a temporary condition where sudden emotional upset or other physical stress can cause the apical ballooning of the heart’s left ventricle. It distorts and enlarges so that it’s narrowed at the top and swells outwards at the bottom. The Japanese word ‘takotsubo’ is the name of an octopus trap with a similar form. The octopus can get into the circular trap, but there’s not enough room for it to manoeuvre itself to turn around and get out.

That’s the thing about pain: we forget it. Our bodies can withstand more than we give them credit for.

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. Stupidly, when you don’t visit at all you never feel guilty because you can pretend none of it’s happening.

In Victorian times, women would mourn the death of a loved one by filling small vials called lachrymatory bottles with their tears. By the time the liquid had evaporated the grieving period would be over.

I like to measure my tears too. To see my suffering quantified, categorised. 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.

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

Up to 60 per cent of the body is made up of water; does that mean once I have cried all of it out I will be a different person? One filled with a liquid less tainted by sadness?

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

I was crying because I knew it would get me what I want. Tears are women’s weapons. And like men and their guns, they can be used unfairly; ‘crocodile tears’. The phrase comes from the myth that crocodiles cry while eating humans, feigning grief while doing bad things.

Why did I let cleanliness and order become the language of our love?

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.

The tears stop after a while and Mum is happy because she thinks it means I’m getting better.

He did things because he really believed in them, I do things because they will make me look better. He was academic, I am creative. He’s a big-light person, I’m a lamp person.

I couldn’t believe that a film could have that effect on me.

I know it’s bad, but I can’t quite comprehend enough to care. ‘I’m sorry,’ I tell her, feeling sorry for no one but myself.

‘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.

I cry because it’s pathetic that he still gives me butterflies even when he’s talking the logistics of leaving me forever. Because I stuck to all the rules. I became a ghost and he didn’t miss me when I disappeared.

It’s as if some of me was hidden right down in him to begin with and the more I knew him the more I knew myself. I started to speak more in lectures. I said, ‘I’m talking,’ when people interrupted me. I started wearing short dresses again and stopped trying to look like the cool girls. I made fun of him because his world was small, and he laughed because not everything that came out of me was stupid.

It hurts when people criticise your ex because you’re still in love with them and, now that you have lost them, you love them more than ever. Now the only relationship you share is one in the past tense: had, held, tasted, touched, breathed, believed. You can’t face the memories being ruined, because that’s all you have left. I will cling onto each one until the scabs on my hands weep.

The sixty or so people who have the condition often say that recovering from loss is impossible when you can’t forget.

As the wind breaks against my bones it feels like I’m being cleaned. The thought doesn’t comfort me; it makes me think of all that I am losing.

I tell him that when the revolution comes we will use texting as a measure of who gets to live and who is shoved under the guillotine for being part of the generation that made us pay university fees and rented out their second homes.

For some reason, tonight it makes me laugh. 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 still do. I’ll try my best to forget, but I think I’ll love you for all my life.

I keep drinking until I reach the level of drunk where I’m sober enough to realise there’s no point worrying about anything.

‘Basically, you know to be sad because your friends look sad when they look at you.’

‘I just don’t think about it,’ she said. ‘I know that if I did it would ruin me and I wouldn’t get out of bed and I wouldn’t work, so I just put it away in this box and one day in a few years’ time, when I’m ready, I’ll open it.’ I didn’t think it sounded healthy to keep all that pain inside. Wouldn’t it start to rot? Crawl out into her dreams?

That’s a disgusting way of describing something, but it turns out love is fucking disgusting.

I start crying and the cries come out like big gusts of wind that shake through me. ‘I just feel so empty.’

Eventually, the chat ebbs away and he stops replying. I have hundreds of conversations like this. He is one of 134 matches. I’m not sure what number I am for him.

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?’

because men are meant to be the most important thing in our lives, so what they don’t value starts to feel insignificant.

If you actually look closely at an X-ray of a vagina it looks like a flower. All these tubes explode out like long stems; swollen pink glands become petals – it’s somewhere between a rose and a tulip.

I get the ick – that sudden, slightly sick feeling where you find someone you previously thought attractive all at once extremely unattractive and everything they do is infuriating. Not because this guy got something wrong, but because he looked so pathetic when he realised.

He’s not the only one who gives me the ick. I get it because one guy waits for me to say ‘table for two’ even though he’s standing in front of me, because one guy says he ‘felt like superman’ when he snorted coke for the first time, because one guy begins a sentence with ‘the thing with girls, right …’, because one guy holds his cutlery between his fist and bites down on the fork when taking things off it, because one guy meets me holding an umbrella, because one guy’s legs are dangling off a bar stool, because one guy presses the traffic-light button and actually waits for the green man and I’ve already crossed over and am standing waiting at the other side of the road, because one guy has all this white stuff between his teeth, because one guy’s shoulders hunch upwards when he gets cold, because I accidentally imagined one guy wearing a dressing gown, because I accidentally imagined another standing naked in the bathroom waiting for the shower to heat up.

I used to want him all the time when I couldn’t have him. But now he can be mine, I realise what I wanted was a fantasy I built up in my head.

In bed, he swipes past my clit like he’s scanning items on the Sainsbury’s self-checkout machine.

For a moment I stop wanting to find a man and instead I just want myself, my arms wrapped around my own shoulders, holding myself tight.

I realise all you need for happiness is yourself; no one else needs to help you achieve anything, to help you feel it. The obviousness hits me like a revelation.

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.

‘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.

She had a belly, but it didn’t look like a flaw; it looked luxurious. As though curves meant also having curves on your stomach, not just on your boobs and your bum.