I like beginnings best: essays, relationships, nights out, apartments. There is a cleanness to the openings. I prefer first dates to second ones, and I would rather stay at the game. I am so precious about first lines.
The problem with writing about a break up is that you start with the epilogue and then go back to the beginning.
I found myself clinging to the idea that I would write my way out of the emotional trenches that were waiting for me while I faced the dissolution of a four year relationship. I would lend logic to my sadness by putting it down on paper. It would be productive.
I did not account for the largeness of the loss. I had imagined our break up many times and I was prepared for it. Theorizing didn’t prepare me for the ways it would hurt and how little we have to say about it.
I knew that the world was filled with case studies proving that the break ups were survivable. That didn’t change the feeling of being in a vacant space. The day we broke up, I sent a text to a friend that said, “I know this is a long-term kind of hurt.” In the meantime, what do I do with my hands?
I tried to write every day. I kept my fingers busy and gave myself deadlines. The prose arrived in fragments. There are bits and pieces. I wrote my entries in the second person because I thought it would take me away from myself.
It is easy to see that my intentions lay in making my misery valuable. I wanted a pay-off if a break-up hurt that much. The dull ache might be worthwhile if I could write sentences that were focused on my angst. The absurdity of that project became clear when I read some 60 pages of drafting later. No matter how much prose I coughed up, my grief couldn’t be exchanged for more money.
While we were together, I never wrote about my ex. I had always believed that self-respecting writers avoided the subject of love like the plague. They had something bad to say about it.
My reluctance was more than just an aversion to clichés. The futility of the endeavor wrapped it up. I didn’t know what I was in for when I read about falling in love. I was sated in ways that resisted language. I don’t need crutches to make sense of the world. I didn’t want to make sense of it for fear of poking holes. For fear of deflating it, this thing that made me feel like I was filled with helium in lieu of plain-old organs.
I was able to write about him after he left. Birthday cards, razors, unresolved arguments, clothing and other items were left by the sensation that had cleared. It was a long time. He wouldn’t be gone just yet if I could explain to myself what the static was between us.
The breed of self-torture grew tired. I had no novel or interesting to say about my despair. I began to write about other things, such as the diner on Dekalb and riding my bike at night. I took notes and kept my hands busy. I did not write about us.
A former college professor sent a book to me nearly a year after our break-up. We called her.
She was my academic mentor and I can still remember the notes that knocked me sideways. She introduced me to novels and essays that changed my makeup. If she had told me it would make me a better writer, I would have licked the pole. It would amuse her.
The book was an essay collection that she had written. It was about teaching. She was separated from her husband, the pain of it, and her experience making sense of loss in a classroom, all of which were things that were not really about either of those things. This was the proof I was looking for that a breakup novel could be inventive and poetic.
In the first essay of the collection, I said that I was writing the story of our separation as it happened. Something that felt intolerable was embedded with meaning.
I finished drafting a breakup text in December. Each of them focused on clothing in their short story, which was a short one.
The final piece skews more autofiction than personal essay, with the occasional real detail traded in for a building block of narrative momentum. At times, I gave plot to what felt to be grossly human. There was pleasure in that. I had to revise on paper what I could not change in real life.
The finishing of the story didn’t give meaning to the experience. There wasn’t a beam of light or a gorgeous rebound. I never got anything shiny in return for pawning off my heartbreak. At some point, it was comforting to know that the end was small. Against the center. It was still smaller than what would come next.
A heavy dose of reflection, a dash of therapy, and countless tear-sodden conversations with friends were all required in my recovery. It took months for it to diffuse. I don’t care to admit, but there are more gin martinis than I care to admit. I didn’t notice that it happened so slowly. I made it to lunchtime without thinking about Max. I had survived. I was able to see the light.
We don’t have a ritual for grieving after a break up. There is no memorial service, birthday cake, or ball-drop in the aftermath of a separation. It was frustrating to find myself dismantled by the end of a relationship because we don’t have a proper place for that type of loss. It hurt in ways that were deafening and that were garden variety. It just hurt.
Mintz says that the ceremonies of death help the living. The chaos of grieving distracts us in the near term. The end of a relationship has no such formality.
My way of corralling the chaos was my grieving ritual. I wrote every day. The act of missing him felt like a physical blow when I salted old wounds and dissolved myself into reels of memory. I looked at the ways they had inhabited me and us while we were young, stretchy and unforgivably malleable. I gave myself something to do with my hands.
Source:
https://coveteur.com/journaling-after-breakup