“‘I never meant to cause you any sorrow/I never meant to cause you any pain.’” The simplicity of these lines belie their depth, the weight of sadness that comes with feeling the disintegration of a bond with someone you thought you would be with for the rest of your life, whom you loved not simply deeply, not simply intensely, but perilously, with nothing held back from one's heart, risking the very sense of who you are to become something eternal with this other person-and now, somehow, the little eternity you were building together has to end. You had thought you were on the right side of forever already, and everything about you is implicated in the disorienting wrongness and rawness of having to go on without them. There need not even be any cruelty that caused it, no singular selfishness or even multiple acts of malice, for as these lines convey, not all relationships break apart intentionally. What we never tell one another, what we leave to one another to figure out only through heartbreak, is that sometimes our love is not enough. Perhaps we don't say it because we don't know how to say it, perhaps because words fail to convey this deepest of failures, the inexpressibility of just how achingly we desire love and how tragically we mishandle the vulnerability love requires of us. To have a broken heart is to have hoped that reaching as far as one can-perhaps beyond one's grasp-one might be held forever. For finite beings like ourselves to hope for this infinity is a paradox, and so no wonder we counsel against such foolhardiness, aiming for a more manageable form of mutuality; it is insensible to risk so much of oneself, it is not exactly sane, it may even be crazy to hope so deeply as to love…Time is broken along with your heart, and somehow you go on-or some broken version of yourself, an ending that goes on and on without reprieve, persistently awaiting a future wholeness that never seems like it's going to arrive, a messianic time of Parousia wherein this deficient and degraded order of things will pass away and a new time of heartfelt peace and joyful openness will reign…Such is the open question we all face, wounded and woundable as we are: can we become inwardly open enough for both history and possibility to coexist, neither one at the expense of the other? Such a transformation would ask us to become more than we are now, to be a bit more like the infinite divinity who has space for all, as if to say, “‘Let's go for something that we'll never comprehend, let's go for something purple, let's go for something queer. Let's go crazy.’”
~ Joseph Trullinger, “I Am Something That You'll Never Comprehend: A Queer Theological Reading of Purple Rain.” Theology and Prince, edited by Jonathan H. Harwell and Rev. Katrina E. Jenkins, Fortress Academic, 2019, pp. 45-65.
Alright, so I admit I’m doing things a bit bass-ackwards here, and writing about love ending after I just wrote about skipping towards new love, but if you think life, or thoughts, or emotions are linear, or circular, or even geometric, then can I also interest you in this lovely bridge I’m selling?
Also - phew - how could I possibly say anything more or better than the gorgeous, illuminating quotation, above?
(Nevertheless, I persist.)
So. Having recently found myself possessed of a shattered heart, I spent many weeks listening to depressing music and reading heartbreak poetry. Like this poem, by W.H. Auden, which may be the saddest poem ever written. It is about the death of a lover, but what is a breakup, if not a death of sorts?
Funeral Blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
Next, I crashed hard into the anger phase of grief (still waiting for that phase to fully end), and I did what anyone would do in that situation: I wrote a really crappy, maudlin poem about love (well, a few - but this is the only one that is fit to print :)). Since I would never attempt to publish it, I’ll share it with you, my reader-guinea pigs, but be nice, ok? I’m grieving here.
Love Is Not Glue
Love is not glue.
Things that are stickier
than love: my children’s
hands, an abandoned
red lollipop on the
white carpet,
the basement door.
Inertia is stronger than love.
And habit. The known
is stronger than love.
Love is not sacred.
It is Communion with
saltines and kool-aid.
It is a hymn sung
out of tune and
word-jumbled,
trailing off into
awful silence.
You can wake up sick
every morning sick for love
and sick of what the day
holds and do it again tomorrow
and again the day after and
again every day for the rest
of your life why?
Because love is not a nuclear
force nor even gravitational.
It is tug of war with a mannequin.
It is neither push nor pull.
Love is not magnetic.
A fridge door grabs harder.
The blocky wooden train
cars on a toy track chug
together longer, stick
with greater loyalty.
Love flops and recedes.
Love falls terribly to the
floor and shatters.
Love freezes in the headlights.
Love flees in the dark.
See? I warned you. (Feel free to reread the Auden, so that you remember what good poetry sounds like.)
Still, I don’t think I’m beyond the pale here. This is what happens when love leaves. You write bad poetry, or read good poetry, or listen to sad music, or furious music, or send one last howl of a letter full of everything you most want to say (which your former love won’t even read, much less respond to), or contemplate setting fire to the birthday gifts that you worked on for months, which your callous ex never even bothered to accept…
Ahem.
You get the point. You do whatever dramatic, self-indulgent things you think will help, and then, when the smoke clears, you pick up the stupid, fractured pieces of the snow globe you were existing in, and move on.
It’s not that easy of course, the moving on. But at some point you will start to feel as if the bonds that have pinioned you to the low place have just a little give to them. And you’ll start to notice the sunlight more in your days. And maybe - probably! - you’ll go on a thrilling date one night (perhaps, hypothetically, with a brilliant and kind and very sexy professor ;)), and come home all golden with happiness, and maybe there will be a second date, or a different person will light you up, and the ache will start to ease. And of course if what you had before was the Real Deal, then you know there will always be a piece of your heart that won’t fully heal (even as you wonder if your ex has already forgotten about you completely). But you know what will happen? One day you’ll find that crappy maudlin poem and look at it fondly, like a picture of yourself as a sullen teen, and you’ll feel a twinge of pain to remember the agony of that era in your life, but you’ll also know for sure that life has circled back to better.
In the novels Olive Kitteridge and Olive, Again, by Elizabeth Strout, the title character - who I contend is one of the greatest characters in modern literature - has this vivid habit of waving goodbye after she is already walking away, “tossing her hand over her head” in a careless-yet-intentional gesture laden with meaning. And that is exactly the gesture I need to summon right now, as I attempt to walk away from love: a nonchalant farewell offered with my back firmly turned on the one who hurt me. I’m not there yet. But at least that damned poem is out of my system.
P.S. I know I cannot ask others to reveal themselves as nakedly as I do on this site, but I would love to read, in the comments or by email, some of your break-up recovery stories - the more dramatic and over-the-top, the better. I can’t be the only one writing bad poetry or plotting the immolation of significant objects, right?
Love Is Not Glue
It's not glue that always holds forever though, I suspect, like glue, love leaves a residue, which can look like memory, learning, a lovely or not-so-lovely path that is part of a longer journey. Thank you for sharing parts of your journey with me. That's a form of love too.
I would like to add a better comment but there’s no way to sum it up. I had a friend for 17 years. She betrayed me. There’s no recovery story, at least not yet. My heart is still broken. I appreciate the poetry though ... the poetry helps.