Notes on Heartbreak

by Annie Lord

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.

Over time I learned to love my body through your love. Through borrowing your eyes. But now you’re gone and my eyes no longer like what they see.

Is this what the past month has been? Breaking me down so I can be built back up again stronger?

They call it a revenge body for a reason, because it stings like a knife in the back.

If people notice a change when you lose weight, it’s only because you’re more confident and that’s attractive. You’re still that same you with abs; you’re still her with a spare tyre around the waist. All those tiny changes we obsess over are so surface level. It’s something behind the eyes that we’re drawn to.

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 – imagine some man picking me up and putting me on a kitchen counter, my tiny frame drowning in a trench coat on a crisp autumn day with leaves crunching under my feet. So I start following the rules again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.

There’s not much tongue and it annoys me because I want him to break into my body and crawl around in there, fill it up, spread himself out so that he’s pushing himself against the walls of my skin like a crayon colouring right up to the lines.

He’s wearing a grey vest and his biceps bulge out of it in such a stereotypically attractive way it’s almost embarrassing to look at him.

‘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.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘You’re going to go, though, aren’t you?’ ‘Yeah.’

‘Just don’t sleep with him.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Oh Jesus, you’re going to try to do that as well, aren’t you?’ ‘Yeah,’ I say, and we’re both laughing again.

Hearing this stuff makes me feel less alone. How funny that the best person to help you through a break-up is most likely the one who did it to you.

The sex is the best sex because it possesses the perfect alchemy of getting with someone who knows you so well they can sense exactly where you want to be touched, but also they’ve been gone for long enough that their body has all the newness and sparkle of a stranger.

It’s supposed to be humiliating, what I’ve done, letting the one who said he didn’t want me have all of me – so much that he’s literally inside my body.

enjoying the process of achieving comfiness again and then – as soon as we do – turning over and trying to get comfy again, as if to stop ourselves from taking for granted what’s good. To never get used to something, to feel it afresh every time.

‘Don’t laugh at me, but maybe we could be each other’s soulmates? And then we could let men be just these great nice guys to have fun with?’

I love her laugh. It sounds like winning.

Make sure that pussy gets home safe. ‘No, stop it!’ she screams. ‘I’m going to get a stitch. Do you think he knows there’s a woman attached to said pussy?’

I want to ask him why he’s not suggested another day. But I can’t do that because to make him want me, I have to make him feel as though he’s losing me.

I scratch at his back so that I can take traces of him home under my fingernails like a murderer too careless to wear gloves.

‘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.

You must have really liked hearing my laughter. I wonder what it sounded like to you. Like heaven? Like rain on the window when you know you don’t have to leave the house that day?

And Freud is always talking about mothers so maybe it’s something to do with that. I bend every narrative to suit the one that suggests he still wants me, scrolling down the list of people who have watched my Instagram story to see if he has, because if so then I can tell myself that he hasn’t quite let me go because he still wants to see what I’m up to. If he hasn’t that doesn’t really matter either because I’ll just pretend that he can’t watch my story as it will make him miss me too much. ‘Why did he do it?’ I ask people, but I never like their answers.

What happens if you’ve got depression or body dysmorphia? Are you not allowed to accept love?

I used only to care about people’s moods in so much as they affected my own. I felt bad when people were skint because it meant they wouldn’t be able to come to the festival with me. I was happy when they got a boyfriend because there would be male friends I’d probably fancy.

I jump up and sit on the grey worktop and enjoy the feeling of youth that comes from having my feet dangling so far away from the ground.

It was never something you asked for. I disappeared all on my own.

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. I gave him my arms and my legs and he ran away with them and I don’t know how to get them back.

I suppose it’s my fault for giving it all over to him in the first place. I felt he owed me all of him like he had all of me.

This is a problem so many women face. That of trying to make men care as much as they do.

Unknowingly she pushed me towards an end which didn’t serve her needs, only mine.

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

‘Love to play the occasional board game together or beers in the garden. We also respect each other’s privacy and have our own friendship circles’ = these guys only talk when it’s time to complain about whichever flatmate keeps using the ‘it’s soaking’ excuse instead of doing the washing up.

When I do make it to house viewings I find that they’re a lot like dating in a way. You end up modulating yourself into the sort of person you think they’d want you to be. ‘I’m clean … yeah, but not, like, anally … I mean, I tidy up after myself, you know? … No, sorry, I didn’t mean it like that … if there’s a general mess I’ll help out because sometimes it builds up and you don’t know whose it is and someone’s just got to do it … Yes, I like parties … Yeah, that’s fine that this is not a party house … I don’t want to party in my own house … No, I won’t be coming home late … much … yes, I’m a freelancer … Your landlord needs someone in full-time employment? OK, no worries, thanks, nice to meet you, yep, thanks, bye, bye … bye.’

Tell him that ‘society has convinced us that our only value comes from what we produce. Not caring about what you make is kind of cool, I think. There’s something so desperate and needy about ambition. Like you’re searching for this approval from somewhere. I want a lazy person with lots of money,’

I think about him doing stuff to me that I didn’t even know I wanted people to do to me. He kind of repulses me but in a hot way.

I have a theory that in life, when it comes to the important stuff – family, friends, work and love – you can’t have them all going well at the same time. Sometimes you get one of these aspects in line, sometimes three, but one of them always needs more attention.

Knowing what went wrong between us doesn’t make me feel better. It encourages the small, noisy part of myself that’s always saying I should have tried harder.

I’m drunk and confrontational so I stare back until they snap their gazes away.

But then there are these strangers who come along and help you in ways the ones close to you never could. And they’re never thanked because, for whatever reason, it would be too intense for them to know the depth of the pain they tugged you away from.

‘I feel like we’d have really good sex,’ he says, wiping away the wet from his bottom lip. Normally I’d hate that kind of pressure levelled on an encounter because it sets you up to disappoint and I do better when I’m proving something wrong. It makes me worried that I might forget what to do, like where your legs go when you’re on top or how to move your hips. But right now, I know what he says to be true.

It’s not a particularly nice reason why. It’s because this ugly part of myself thinks I can do better than him. He doesn’t look like the man I want to end up with, so there’s a recklessness to our interactions. I’m more forward, flirtatious. In bed I might actually direct him to what I wanted.

I’m so annoyed that I let that ukulele-loving prick talk his way into making me like him. I’m not in so deep that it actually hurts that it’s over. I mean, I bet he’s dated at least one white person with dreads. Probably has a sticker over his webcam camera. Probably would try to convince me to wear less make-up if we went out. He looks like he’ll get old and start fangirling Julian Assange. I didn’t want him anyway, I tell myself. I’m just annoyed that his mismanagement of his schedule meant I spent a number of nights staring at my phone waiting for him to reply when I could have been out having fun. I have no idea what happened, and when people ask I can’t explain it because he looked at me like he really fancied me.

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.

Light pollution means the atmosphere reflects the light of high-rises and street lights back onto themselves. As though the arrogant city saw the stars and thought it could do better, so it made up its own solar system, one so powerful it never lets it be night.

I’m nervous that the eyes of one of the men I pass will leer up and down at my body until it feels like it’s no longer mine but his, but when none do I feel slightly deflated because when you spend your whole life being stared at, as young women do, when no one’s looking you wonder if you mean anything at all.

There’s no one more beautiful than the woman who has taken a man from you.

Instead, it was Adham coming out even though he had work in the morning and seeing Rupert and realising people still like me even though I’m not Joe’s girlfriend anymore and how if people say, ‘You should come,’ I will do unapologetically because it probably does mean they want me to be there.

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.

I spent so many hours with this version of them, five days a week, 8 a.m. to 3.30 p.m. for so many years, it’s cemented down into my brain so deep that it’s always a surprise to see them as they are now, no matter how long they’ve been a man.