Notes on Heartbreak

by Annie Lord

I pretend I would play nice because it hurts knowing that so often I haven’t.

‘From the moment I saw you I knew I wanted to belong to you,’

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.

If I broke a rule, I couldn’t stop. Once I’d seen that this whole moral checklist was completely made up and so easily breakable, I couldn’t keep myself from extending entirely beyond its limits.

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir describes the way women lose their identities when they fall in love with men. The centre of the world is no longer where she is but where her beloved is; all roads leave from and lead to his house.

What if, what if, what if. 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.

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.

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.

Didion argues that we don’t just see images, we also interpret the sight of them, choosing the option that best fits with our view of the world, and this allows us to keep on living.

Women aren’t good at taking criticism. Perhaps because we’re not allowed to be anything but perfect in order to be valued. Men can be all types of wrong and still be wanted.

Instead of being the defining feeling that dictates my life, heartbreak starts to become something ordinary that I just have to endure, a sensation like those others – granted, one I will have to endure for longer, but no more or less exceptional.

I’m understanding there’s not one ‘over’. Nothing snaps into place in a moment. There are just lots of small ‘overs’ where gradually you start to understand that you won’t be how you used to be anymore, and maybe that’s OK because maybe the new you will be all right too.

And it’s through this inner dialogue that you become conscious of yourself as someone you can talk to and have a relationship with. I look at her now in that mirror and she’s me and I am her, and although we’re the same thing I see that we can talk to each other even if I will always know what’s coming because she, her, me, is the only thing I can count on to be there for the whole of my life.

this life could be gorgeous if only I gave myself permission to allow it.

after all I loved you so much my heart felt like a bruise.

Sometimes self-care is not caring at all.

I feel as though I’m watching her and Hayley talk from behind a window, one that I can see into but they can’t see out of.

It’s funny how often the future is just a return to the past.

I try to let myself have bel far niente too, to not think I have to earn pleasure, but that I just get to pursue it by virtue of breathing in and out.

Most things that take a long time to make can be enjoyed for a long time too. Like a book with many pages or a big house. But food isn’t like that. What takes hours is gone in a moment. Knowing that I took all that time just for a few minutes of pleasure – my pleasure – well, it shows how deserving I think the person eating it is. I’ve always known how to say I love you with food, and by making this food, and making the effort to do all the parts of the recipe that are normally quite boring and time-consuming, I was saying ‘I love you’ to myself. I love you. I love you. I love you. I will try to make sure I do for the rest of 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.

I’m scared of where this is going because the last time I believed in happiness it left and its departure did worse things to me than sadness ever could.

And yet too much has happened to allow us to go back to that place. I’m not sure what exactly it is – time maybe, or pain – either way, it feels impossible to move beyond it. It’s like that line in Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera: ‘Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.’