Asunder

Breakups are like a violent return to yourself. When someone else breaks up with you, obviously. Because when you break up with whoever you’re with, it’s not at all the same as when they break up with you. I know we all know that, but I thought for clarity’s sake I would just set the record straight, lest I be misunderstood and have to argue my point. I’m not a giant fan of that sort of thing.

Personally, when I think back to previous breakups, they’re classically bittersweet moments. I’m a mental masochist, so part of me is always yearning for something awful to happen, and breakups really satisfy that fucked-up need for chaos and depression. But that said, they’re still kind of beautiful, in a way. Which brings me back to my first observation before clarification: the violent return to yourself.

In the millisecond before the axe falls, suddenly a flurry of activity from a brain once dulled by love and the aching to be loved back. A million thoughts at once, a thousand feelings, and the intense need to explode and be nothing. Be everywhere. You want to drive, you want to run, you want to scream. Incredible feelings, all of them. But the best part is that it’s all you, unmasked, unloved. This is how you were before the compromise and the acting, before you second-guessed every little movement, word, kiss, and orgasm. Well, fake orgasm. You’re really that person. At least, I am. I’m pissed off and violent, angry and alone, but deeply at peace. In the moment, you accept yourself tearfully — This is it. It’s just me. This is how it will be forever. You may mourn, but honestly, why? Why, when you feel more free and full of potential than you ever had in the months, weeks, or years before this great collapse of your security and the betrayal of what you had feared or not expected? All at once, you want to go to the gym, get a haircut, finally get your library card and move to another city. You want to deprive yourself, punish yourself, better yourself.

The moment passes. Was it a second or a day? The real sadness here is that what you lose afterward is that impetus, the burning fury in your mind that probably could have helped you really be happy with yourself, alone. It yields to other things too easily, I guess. For some reason, the opposite happens, or tends to. You don’t run, you don’t drive, you don’t cut and color. Your address will be the same for the next ten years. For a second there, you weren’t stuck, and anything was possible. You missed the window.

But you were alive for a day, you know.