When I was 22 I was in love. I had been in love for quite some time with the man I was seeing. We’d been together for the better part of two years before I stopped hearing from him. It took me about three months to realize we were actually no longer together. It might seem strange that it took me so long but our relationship was so nuanced it didn’t quite allow three months to pass without word, but it wasn’t out of the question. After much consideration, I picked the last Thursday in August to tell him I knew he was ghosting me. He invited me to a bar where we talked it out. By the time we met that quaint last afternoon before the beginning of fall semester, he informed me he had a girlfriend. It’s not a fun story, but I have yet to find an effective way to really tell it besides this. When I said 22 was a horrible cruel joke this was why.
It might seem the story has been over for a while, but it continues to hang over my head, even recently. A couple of weeks before I turned 24, on the final Friday in February, he unfollowed me on social media. Though considerable time has passed between us I sobbed. I cried in my room, in the bathroom, in the living room, and in my sister’s room. I cried on the phone with my mom’s friend, in my friend’s living room, and three times with my own mom. On our third and final teary-eyed call we dissected my reaction only to declare for the first time since my breakup I was grieving.
So I guess the jig is up. I’m not actually having a good time.
Even if I only fooled myself, I had been under the impression of greater progress than I possessed. Grief has forced me to accept two aspects of reality that I find difficult to admit. My life hasn’t really changed. Changed in one sense that this past relationship still affects me deeply and my sadness feels immense. Changed in another sense too, how despite his virtual leaving my life will still be relatively the same. Our relationship has been a continuous string of invisible losses I find difficult to bear and even more difficult to relinquish myself to.
When I emailed my therapist after this happened I told her, in a long-winded admittedly melodramatic way, I’m tired of being sad over someone longer than we were together. It’s a fair assessment in some aspects. I am tired. I’m tired of the sadness I find walking in certain neighborhoods as I remember the life I used to have there. I’m tired of anxiously dry heaving when I walk past his old apartment and tired of the blue fog of sorrow that comes when I drink a glass of wine as I remember everything we will never do. Surprisingly though, I’m not tired of mourning.
That might sound a little strange, but until that final February day, I had considered grief and sadness to be more or less the same thing. Yet grief in someway is sadness marked by loss and in other ways, it’s an experience that is entirely different from the sadness I’d been living. My sadness looked like how I’d described it. Most days I bumped into it on accident and as I had been advised in therapy I felt the sadness in full and continued on with the rest of the day. Sometimes the sadness stayed until I fell asleep but it was usually gone by morning. There was an air of romance to this routine, some self-indulgence. Sometimes I wanted to be sad. My sadness looked outwards rather than inwards. I pictured my new life with the nostalgic and false optimistic image of the man I knew, it was my way of keeping him with me. My sadness to me mirrored Rubin’s vase. If I looked quickly at the illusion of my life I could see myself, the subject, and every aspect which seemed ever moving forward. Only when I stared for too long on some days did I see a negative space impossible to ignore and shaped perfectly like him.
Grief has exposed me to the security I found in this image, in anticipating both his absence and his abandonment. I see now, the severe gap of loneliness I have, and I am afraid of closing it as much as I am tired it’s here. This awareness is the progress I find mourning has allowed. It’s a strange progress too, it feels like things are worse but really I see now more clearly how these two years have always been.
Grief contains anger and hopelessness as much as it contains sadness. Indulging my sorrow was needed, but there are other emotions I needed to lean into, ones I had considered to be poor taste or bitter. When I left the bar and admittedly the shittiest breakup situation I could imagine, I focused a majority of my reactions to leaving the relationship on good terms. As a result, my healing process became stunted. When the grief never came I had concluded by having already had the difficult life-shattering first heartbreak as a teenager I was exempt from anything as bad. That is what they say, the first heartbreak is the worst. I felt having gone through it once already I had come to my second horrible break up the better, the wiser, the ever more mature woman than the one of the past. I seemingly forgot breakups on even the best of terms can be devastating.
In the past month, I’ve explored the anger and hopelessness I find here as I used to with the sadness. For the first time ever I said the words I hoped I’d never say: I wish he and I had never met (anger). I cried after. I hated how bitter it sounded and so unlike me. I couldn’t imagine I’d ever recover from this, to be who I was before we met, so full of love to give (hopelessness).
I understand this to be the real end of the story, the wrapping up loose ends, the farewells, no more twists and turns. Even I feel the calm knowing now he can’t come back. Yet of course I’ve lived this story for long enough I’m afraid of what it means to come to a close. I’ve been asked what I want out of love in the future and truthfully I just don’t know. I notice though my perception of the sad story feels more easily contained. For a while, the only way I imagined love was someone feeling bad for me. I wanted to tell this story and lay in bed afterward and cry all night while someone else felt sad too. It felt like the pain was three-dimensional and potent enough everyone needed to help me carry it. It has shrunk now visually even if the river runs deep. My perception has shifted. A sad thing has happened to me but a sad thing I will not become.
All of this is healing in good time. The valley of grief demands you walk through it and every day I do. Walking through doesn’t require you to be better all at once. I don’t take points off for being afraid. I know one day it will pass. In some ways it already has. For the first time since I met my ex at 20 years old, I had a crush, a real nervous, red in the face, crush! It’s the little things.
For a while, I felt embarrassed by this. For one thing “he unfollowed me” is so distinctly 21st century I cringed when I said it. It’s less romantic than a Jane Austen book like “he’s engaged to be married” or something of that caliber. Yet the technology of it all is important. We are a generation somewhat forced to date via the internet and its grief is one that perhaps no one has prepared us for. To others he’d been gone, but not to me. I could still look for him. I could count on his name appearing in my notifications. When it did I’d stare at it, run my hand over it, I knew he was just beyond it. Sometimes I expected it to feel different beneath my fingers and was disappointed by its flatness. This form of loss we face exists, it’s not invisible to those who experience it.
A grueling five days post unfollow I made it to therapy, hanging on by a thread. I spent the 45 minutes saying all the things I was afraid to say. I emptied the anger and hopelessness with the self-awareness of someone who knew it was a momentary truth rather than a lifelong one. I knew I wasn’t doomed to get my heart broken for the rest of my life, even if I said so now. I wouldn’t always wish we’d never met. I knew too eventually everything was going to be okay. I felt it rather deeply and profoundly. Over those five days before my session, my sorrow lifted like a fog in my chest for momentary relief, and I felt my future healing before the sadness returned. It was a hard crossroads to stand at, not yet healed, but aware it was looming. I carefully illustrated this place of contradiction I existed in to my therapist. I wanted to move on, but I was afraid of the contractual obligations I understood moving on required of me.
“I want to acknowledge that this is how you feel and that’s okay. You are here. This is where you are.”
My therapist’s words reverberated. I liked how she said it. There was somewhat a recalibration in its delivery. I considered the desire to move on as one space and the fear of doing so to be another. If it were simply, here, I was able to decorate here however I wanted. The longer I sat there the more I saw its interior. I could still miss him in this place. And I do. I miss him all the time. I want to talk about New Yorker articles we both read again and joke about being husband and wife. I still walk down the hallway to my room after brushing my teeth and hope to see him sitting in my room waiting for me to go to sleep. I miss laughing and reading aloud to each other. I miss knowing if he’s okay. Here also knows I can’t go back, not because it’s in the past, but because this version of me couldn’t exist there. I want new things, things I know our relationship couldn’t give, and things I am no longer willing to compromise on. My life reflects my adaption in spite of all the missing. I sleep in the middle of my bed diagonally, I finish books and contemplate them to myself. The best thing though is the laughing. I laugh more than before. The thing I like about here is all of that is allowed to be true, without reason, without explanation.
I’ve been tired for so long, here is a fine place to rest now that I’ve added my own decorum. Now I know healing is a delivery. Not every day, but every so often I experience something new, something changing of my grief. It starts with an unexpected knock at the door, a knock on my weary heart. When I open I see something for me has arrived and whoever delivers it always says the same thing:
Well, I guess this must be the place.
From my self-proclaimed awful taste in music: my grief in ten songs and two moods.
Top five, in my feelings, sad music video, walking on a rainy day, I miss my ex songs I listened to this month while I was grieving.
Hope is a Heartache by Leon
The 1 by Taylor Swift
Fine Line by Harry Styles
Let It All Out by Coin
Center of Gravity by The Brazen Youth
Top five I hate my ex and I’m moving on, dancing in my living room, power walking songs I listened to this month while I was grieving
Party For One By Carly Rae Jepsen
Ego by Koren Grace
I Will Survive By Gloria Gaynor (duh)
Jerome by Lizzo
Chiquitita by ABBA
“I once asked my friends if they'd ever held things that gave them a spooky sense of history. Ancient pots with three-thousand-year-old thumbprints in the clay, said one. Antique keys, another. Clay pipes. Dancing shoes from WWII. Roman coins I found in a field. Old bus tickets in second-hand books. Everyone agreed that what these small things did was strangely intimate; they gave them the sense, as they picked them up and turned them in their fingers, of another person, an unknown person a long time ago, who had held that object in their hands. You don't know anything about them, but you feel the other person's there, one friend told me. It's like all the years between you and them disappear. Like you become them, somehow.”
—H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
I met with my friend Emily to do a collage night for my birthday and made something vaguely resembling the newsletter and how I felt. I was a bit somber as I made it. I was nervous the newsletter wasn’t going to come together because truthfully I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. So I put what I knew I wanted to include. It seems full circle considering I had a crush on the guy who broke my heart when I met Emily and spent hours talking about him, way too much, embarrassingly so. We laugh about it now (me more than her possibly). I made this and it got ruined in the rain. Alas, the universe might be telling me to let go of everything, even the things I make to replace the things I’ve lost.
My April Moodboard awaits you!
Oh, April! Though I have perhaps brought about a less than light theme I feel a joy nonetheless for having written this. This is always a story I sit somewhat on the outskirts of because I can’t say I am ready to dive in just yet. There is still grief to be had. Even so, April feels fresh and I feel a relief for having gone a little deeper into this story of love than before. Washington Square Park, before I left for home, I noticed has begun to grow buds. Like every year, seemingly overnight, there will be green. Leaves leaves leaves. It means to me summer and joy and warmth and freedom. I’ll thank everything in me for the world to no longer be stripped bare. It’s interesting the life we see ahead just from the first sign of growth. It reminds us what was missing, but shows us what we’re getting back. So if you find yourself outside and you look up at those trees with their fresh new-faced leaves, and somewhere so deep its inexplicable, and yet you are so aware of its location you feel a sense of security and joy, I hope you think of me. It’s what I felt as this month came to a close even if the grief remains. What a life ahead.
That’s all this month! If you enjoyed the little conversation we had let me know! Save +share your favorite parts and tag @chloeinletters
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My Goodreads where I sometimes write reviews but keep updated is right here where more of my library is contained as far as books go.
My website is where you can check out my portfolio and contact me
My email, if you want to cut to the chase, is letterstochloew@gmail.com where you can let me know what you think or ask me a question about what you saw here!
Here’s to crying in every room, shitty boyfriends, and Starbucks Fridays.
Love always,
Chloé
Read your monthly comments, Chloe. Truly an exploration of the internalized sense of emotional loss. As it continues, though, there is a lessening of what in the past was a sense of inescapable hurt to the realization that it is not just the painful past but also the expanding demands, interests, social commitments that consume your days. The past is a much explored experience. The future is the unknown, full of surprises, a land feared by some and seen as an adventure by others. There are about 170,000 words in the English language, and it is an irresistible palette we can use to describe world around us. Keep writing, I look forward to your observations.
You are here, and we are here with you. Love you, Coco!