Throughout the whole one million years year
that I’ve been broken up with The Shy One (Two months longer than we’d been
together! I feel so impatient with this process!) I feel like I maintained some
sort of dignity about the situation. At least, as much dignity as one can have
while writing a million paragraphs and creating however-many art projects about
a beloved ex a guy who dumped me right before Valentine’s Day.
I’ve been so strong, even with the Christmas mushroom
gummies and the letters and the unblockings and reblockings and the endless
wondering what to do with the just-not-my-style jewelry set he brought me back
from his trip home. (Resolved: Even though if I wore it I would look like a
deranged, appropriating haunt from the Island of the Well-Meaning-White Ladies,
it’s beautiful and special and I’m keeping it. I’ll probably hang the earrings
on the Christmas tree next year.) I’ve had, for the most part, willpower.
Sometimes I was a bitch, sometimes just unbearably nakedly needy, but still, with
some underlying dignity.
Until this year’s Valentine’s Day. I blame the movie Valentine’s
Day—it’s a fave, but this Valentine’s lunch time, it really twisted the
knife. Maybe it was a knife that needed twisting.
There’s this part where Bradley Cooper is telling Julia
Roberts about his breakup and she says something like:
“Nothing to be done?”
And that just struck the saddest chord on the lobby
piano in the overpopulated hotel that is my heart. I STILL think there’s
something I could have done, some part of me I could have folded up and put
away (Maybe in with the Christmas ornaments?) so that he wouldn’t have left me.
In the background of all the love and joy and growth and vexation of time
moving forward, my brain is still whirring away on that puzzle. I sincerely
hope it will stop doing that someday.
I decided to be sad for a few minutes on the way to my
evening job. I’d (Fit of well-being! Optimism! The life changing magic of tidying
up my Spotify lists!) deleted my Grief Walk mix but, uh, luckily? There
was this new single from Usher featuring Burna Boy, Coming Home. It
devastated me all the way to my bones. It made me want to find The Shy One and just let him consume me until there was nothing left. I
looked up the lyrics and it says “not just leave you for dead.” But metaphorically
that’s what I wanted, to be so deep in shock and love and sex as to evaporate all
the way to heaven and stay there this time, not drift back to reality and a Shy
One QUICKLY getting his pants on to go, that last time.
It's fine, I can drive to work and self-immolate at
the same time!
I knew there couldn’t be any seeking-out-and-being-consumed,
so I did something maybe even less advisable—I looked at his Instagram in the
few minutes before work started. There wasn’t much to see there, but there was
this:
March 15, 2023, a little more than a month after we broke
up. A stupid, generic meme saying “That feeling when everything’s just coming
together.”
I know he wasn’t posting it AT me, but fuck you, dude.
While I was raking the back terrace listening to fucking A Grief Observed, while
I was going back to Unitarian Church to feel less isolated and alone, while I
was planning to commemorate our first date/the first day of Ramadan with a
street art project, his life had found exactly where it needed to be, at least
in that moment of posting.
And I’m so mad at myself because the feeling he was
having in that basic-as-fuck meme, it’s a feeling I wish for him! For everyone
I love. It’s a great fucking feeling that everyone deserves. Resenting him for
that moment of epiphany makes me seem so curdled and rotten, and in that moment,
I was.
I reunlocked his WhatsApp thread and sent at desperate
and devastated few questions, followed, not too long later, by an “Oops, please
disregard.”
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