on heartbreak

The soft animal of my body remembers—how we are not thinking machines but feeling machines that think. Imagination forms in the brain but hunger comes from the heart, from the place where desire sharpens like teeth. This is the story of my first heartbreak, from long long ago.

There was nothing about the way that the day started to suggest that such a thing was about to happen. It shattered me, tore me apart, and renewed me, all at once. I felt scattered, with no center of gravity.

I went back to Florida to collect myself but even home felt like just another stop. I could feel the warm consoling words of my family and friends slip through the space in my chest. I desperately tried to weave a net that could help me collect enough of myself to make me solid again. Like sand I felt myself slipping away, never whole, never still.

I felt a phantom fullness right before I left, when my mom hugged me goodbye at the airport, when I looked into her eyes and melted into her arms and let all of her love fill that gap inside me. Soon after, the anchor was gone and no amount of hot pilates or books or ideas or friends could get me to materialize for long enough. 

I floated around the periphery of my routine. I could feel the outline of my personality, but it felt hollow inside, like my sense of myself was more of a memory than a legitimate identity to inhabit. This relationship ended and all I could say is ‘it’s fine, it’s fine’ as I quietly felt something inside me die, there was nothing and no one to come home to. But how do you say that to your friends without sounding insane? 

I understood why we broke up, and I didn’t blame him. But the memory of it tortured me: it climbed from my guts to my heart, it choked me, my brow furrowed, and I closed my eyes as a million bombs detonated inside me, reducing me to piles and piles of sand. I threw myself into work, hoping to write the pain out of me, hoping that if I poured out the last piece of my heart then the pain would end. 

There was a little part of me that did not resist or fight. It was not tough and solid like the rest of me had been, it had no edge or pride or stubbornness. It survived by being flexible and amorphous, by adapting, by turning itself into water. It didn’t fear the void, it observed it, quietly and without judgment or resentment. It learned that there’s no escape, but that the void is not unfriendly. It’s just scary as hell, in the same way that any blank canvas is. 

Somewhere along the course of the relationship, my boundaries had faded - they had collected and merged with parts of someone else. When my heart was obliterated, it felt like a black hole swallowed all of me, its sheer force taking my sense of self along with it. The good news is it took the bad stuff too. I was forcefully detached from old resentments, from fears, from self-doubt - all of the ugly stuff that also makes up our identity. Heartbreak was purifying, in a really important way. We meet people in life that melt and reshape us, and no longer do we fit into our prior molds of ourselves and our reality. Slowly and without noticing, I had undergone a transformation that squeezed me out of who I was - fears included - and presented me with the opportunity to become someone new, someone better. At the moment of the breakup, it was unclear that I had in fact become more optimistic, bolder, more chill, and more willing to dream. 

I accepted the empty space as a neutral fact, a blankness that was mine to fill. One that would someday be full, only to become a void again - I’m sure life has many more nukes in stores for me. But I’m ready. If a part of me fought to survive it’s for a good reason, there must be enough at stake that she wants to see through.

I find myself coming back to something more real, to that part of me that’s willing to shed everything, to turn into something elemental to survive, to be water.