Notes on Heartbreak

by Annie Lord

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.

worked to mould myself into another shape and I thought everything would change, but nothing did. I was the exact same funny but not hilarious, good-looking but not beautiful, clever but not intelligent person I always was.

turn to him and each of my petals fall off because I thought love was fullness but right now it feels like an obliteration, like burning out into nothing – white heat, purple flames and then it’s gone.

shouldn’t just be about self-optimisation. ‘Be your own best friend,’ they say, as if satisfaction means overcoming the feeling of loneliness, because apparently this emotion is not a logical result of the fact that humans are social animals but a defect that can be eliminated if you spend enough time focusing on hobbies.

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. She uses his words and repeats his gestures, adopts his manias and tics. ‘I am Heathcliff,’ says Catherine in Wuthering Heights; this is the cry of all women in love; she is another incarnation of the beloved, his reflection, his double: she is he. She lets her own world flounder in contingence. She lives in his universe.

‘Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.’