Notes on Heartbreak

by Annie Lord

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.

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

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

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

A lot of the time the only way to withstand pain is to poeticise it, imagine it as something beautiful, unparalleled. Why suffer for something ordinary?

When you’ve got grey hair and crow’s feet, telling someone ‘I love you’ will mean more than it did when it first tumbled out on a night when you came hard and then rolled off what’s now soft and drifted into a deliciously milky half-sleep.

You’d think departure would be a quiet sound, but it’s not, it’s noisy. His absence talks to me.

He did things because he really believed in them, I do things because they will make me look better.

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 remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down?

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.

Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes – like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night – little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on my image of her. The real shape will be quite hidden in the end.

One school of scientists believes that memories are not singular occurrences that we return to, but rather endless repetitions of that memory and the memory of that memory and that memory and so on. There is no stable ‘memory fragment’, or what is often called a ‘trace’; instead, we create a new ‘trace’ each time to house the thought. Meaning each memory is a mere copy of a copy, each one a more distant reconstruction of the first.

And I only think of him now because I force myself to. Just to make sure it still hurts.

Why should I alone shoulder the burden of memory when he is so quick to throw it away? Pulling my hairs out of his jumpers. Deleting from his phone all the nudes I sent him. Squinting so that the image of my body becomes blurred in between the gaps in his eyelashes. I can forget too, I can push him away. I want to snog men that I’ll regret snogging in the morning, and fall over and bruise my knees, have that fling Granny was talking about.

I guess that’s how people go on, without knowing how.

I still do. I’ll try my best to forget, but I think I’ll love you for all my life.

I’ve come to think of my ‘self’ – my personality – as an entity that collapses when I am alone and unperceived by others; but then, as if by magic, when I am with other people, my ‘personality’ reassembles itself.

And we stayed like that all day in the sort of bliss where you start arguments not because anything needs to be resolved, but because the flaws make you realise just how perfect everything else is.

I like that I have the long-sleeved T-shirt here. His socks. These things are all that tie him to me. Once they’re gone there will be no reason for us to talk. And it seems so unfair to get annoyed at him for doing something that makes me feel so much better.

It’s only in retrospect that you look back and recognise that this moment of clarity was the moment where you began to change – the start, the beginning, all you could ever hope for.

I was so secure in this love, I thought that he would forgive me for each and every one of those mistakes, but soon they all piled up and there were too many of them and all these tiny ones were enough for him to say, ‘I want to be on my own.’

How funny that the best person to help you through a break-up is most likely the one who did it to you.

It was fun learning each other’s stories at first, but when we try to invent new ones we find that we have such different ideas about what makes a good story.

What Virginia Woolf meant when she said women are looking glasses that reflect the image of man back at twice their natural size.

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.

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.

I remember now what I forgot before. That to have power you have to have someone to be powerful over. That’s what I am for him. I bend so that he can climb on my back and stand taller. In that way I make the power. Really, it is mine. If I said no, there would be nothing. No one would ascend and we would both be crawling around on the floor. But I want him to be tall, so I think about becoming the carpet he sinks his toes into. The table he rests his feet on. Everything is a yes. I am one enormous big fat walking yes. Shame or embarrassment – ‘I don’t think I can do that’ – becomes me doing that very thing on a plate. I stretch out, I open up. I fit more of him in my mouth than I ever have before. I spit and gag. I roll over. He says, ‘Jump,’ and I say, ‘How high?’ and together we reach the stars.

We used to hate that things never changed, that we had the same arguments about the same mistakes again and again. But now that sameness is a blessing because we can come back after all this time and it’s still there. I was so worried about all the mistakes I made, but now I see that they are the most special part. They mean we wanted each other at our worst.

‘Love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing.’

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

I’m not sure how much I can bear his lips, how much of me would disappear into them, down his throat. How it would feel to continue to live in the world through him, how much of me would be left if he spat me back out.

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. So they do their invisible labour quietly, unknowingly pulling you from a darkness they can’t even see.

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.

Think about how strange it is that so much of human touch is driven by intuition alone with no awareness of what the other person actually feels, only what you think would feel nice. I suppose that’s what makes it so intimate, touching someone how you would like to be touched, as though their body had become the same thing as yours.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live,

‘We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.’

I used to find it frustrating that when it comes to the universe you can’t change what has already happened. But right now, this fact starts to feel kind of reassuring as it shows there’s no point endlessly contemplating tactics for sorting it all out because you couldn’t fix it even if you tried.

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 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.

We are the sum of our actions, otherwise what else are we?’

We collapse in a knot of women on Moya’s bed. Limbs woven together like a big tapestry. And we’re all talking, talking, talking and it makes me think about something my mum always says, which is that her favourite thing about women is their ability to chat. The sheer endurance of it is impressive even when taken on its own, but the quality deserves praise too.

Men say women aren’t funny and I think that’s because they need a badum-bum-tish punchline; they don’t see that the humour is riddled through everything we say, so that everyone’s always laughing a little bit.

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 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.

What hurts more than missing him is realising I no longer do.

Love is nowhere near as inevitable as he makes out. It’s not the electric reaction when you meet someone. It’s not the 100 times you ring their phone when they’re out late. Or the way you press your nose into their pillow because it smells like them. It’s something you actively choose to do. Not an instinct, but something to nurture. It’s a verb, not a noun. It’s as difficult as a full-time job. It’s extending your world view to encompass theirs. It’s total generosity. It’s doing things even if they won’t notice them. It’s making a fucking massive deal about their birthday. It’s waiting before watching the next episode of something because you said you’d watch it together. It’s trying to be a better person all the time. It’s googling ‘how can you tell if someone’s depressed?’ or ‘what happens when you drink too much caffeine?’ or anything else that might help them with what they’re going through. It’s making those ‘uh-huh’, ‘mmm’ noises when they’re telling a story so they know you’re still listening. It’s challenging them. It’s muting someone on Instagram because you know you’re not looking at their thighs out of curiosity but because you want to be crushed in between them. It’s every time-worn metaphor about the roots of two trees wrapping around one another. It’s laughing at their Simon Cowell impression even though it’s shit. It’s subscribing to one of those flower-delivery services so that they will think you spontaneously decide to get them flowers every month. It’s ...