Dear Heartbreak Page 7
It’s a delicate tightrope we walk in life, a balance between feeling safe and being true to ourselves. But I can tell you that the world is so much bigger than your school. There are many people who will appreciate you being you (myself included). High school is boot camp for life. It’s a really dumb pre-req that we all have to take to get to the good stuff. And you will get to the good stuff. And you might even have some good times along the way with your fellow weirdos.
So for now, stay strong, stay safe, and stay you.
Much love,
The hard way is my favorite way to learn.
—All Our Pretty Songs, Sarah McCarry
Dear Heartbreak,
Why do you like to visit oh so often? How can I avoid you? Am I at fault for seeing you so much? Maybe I am. Maybe I am the reason that my love life is completely nonexistent.
Why do we like to set our standards on love so high? Yes, every girl dreams of the perfect boyfriend. But is there really such a thing? Every time I find someone that gives me that wonderful flutter in the pit of my stomach, nothing ever happens. It makes sense, though. Why would the nice-looking, popular boys want me—a not popular, average-looking, flat board of a girl? I don’t blame them. But can’t a girl dream?
Why is it that I fall head over heels for any boy that glances in my direction? Or even a boy who hardly knows that I exist? This is what makes you, Heartbreak, come to visit me all the time. Am I really this desperate? I’m finding all of my friends finding boyfriends, but why can’t I? How have I become a ninth wheel? Will I ever not be? I always say I don’t care. My friends say that they can’t see my dating anyone. And I laugh and shrug it off. But that really hits me.
How, in a school of 1,200 people, can I not find anyone? I know when boys like me, but why are they always nobody I want? What am I doing wrong? Any advice could help. It couldn’t hurt to stop spending my weekends alone.
—Confusion
HOW TO FIND A BOYFRIEND IN YOUR HEART
Dear Confusion,
When I was fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and seventeen and eighteen and for a while after that I, too, longed for a boyfriend—not just any boyfriend, a Boyfriend, a fantastical chimera: part myth, part The Secret History, part Chris Cornell, part Miki Berenyi, part Ève Salvail, part Jack Kerouac, part Gary Oldman. The Boyfriend would be tall and lanky like me and wear clothes like mine but better; the Boyfriend would have perfectly broken-in boots and long, dark hair and eyes full of mystery; the Boyfriend would be a poet, and a musician, and write songs about me that were quite good, and gaze lovingly at me from the stage when he played them. The Boyfriend would have read everything. The Boyfriend would be able to quote Shakespeare at appropriate moments.
The Boyfriend wouldn’t be afraid of anything, not death or long hours alone or watching your friends grow up and away from you, not the mystery of fighting through the crowds between first and second period feeling utterly unseen by the hundreds of people who passed you, not of being dumb or ugly or too big or too small or too loud or too much, too messy, too scarred-up and sad for no reason and full of broken glass and barbed wire. The Boyfriend would know my every thought before I thought it, my every wish before I wished it. The Boyfriend would take me around on his motorcycle through the rain-cooled Seattle streets, make me coffee in his apartment on Capitol Hill, kiss me until I no longer felt the chill. The Boyfriend would be at my side always, luckdragon and talisman, a charm against evil, a proof of my worth and beauty (which, of course, the Boyfriend would praise in lavish excess to all; to which, of course, the Boyfriend’s own perfection would serve as wordless testament). The Boyfriend would be able to play songs on the piano after hearing them once. The Boyfriend would be older, not high school; the Boyfriend would have cheekbones like cut glass; the Boyfriend would be infinitely wise and infinitely, absolutely free. But the Boyfriend would come back to me always, my own shadow, my sustenance, my twin. Like a sibling, but psychic and way hotter and completely, totally, mine.
I remember what it feels like, Confusion, to be however old you are—fourteen, fifteen, sixteen? A little older? A little younger?—and spend all your days burning with longing for something bigger and more luminous, something like a new world or a different dimension, something like being loved. I remember feeling bewildered by what I could possibly be doing wrong, mystified by the processes by which seemingly everyone around me fell in love at the drop of a hat and professed themselves stunned by happiness. I remember all of this because it fucking sucked. I don’t know if you will ever fall in love, Confusion, because I don’t know the future, although I’d say the odds are in your favor. I don’t know if the popular boys will ever look at you, or if you will get to go to the best parties, or if your Instagram will be suddenly festooned with bikini-clad snaps of you and your besties and your sun-gilt paramours lounging on beaches or boats or whatever it is popular people do for fun wherever it is you live. Where I come from they drink beer in the woods and have jet skis and it’s not that glamorous. I myself was forever pining after addicts and musicians and sad old drunks who had no business whatsoever hanging around teenage girls, a course of action I do not recommend.
Anyway. It took me a long time to realize that I didn’t want to be loved by the Boyfriend, I wanted to be the Boyfriend. I wanted the black leather jacket, the aloof cool, the fearlessness; I wanted the whole world to run around in; I wanted to write songs that made people fall in love with me. I wanted to be perfect and beautiful and untouchable. I wanted to know Hamlet by heart and at least one of the comedies. I wanted to be good at everything the first time I tried it. I wanted to be clever and wise and have long, heavy hair like a witch’s; I wanted to be a little bit scary; I wanted to stomp around in big black boots and skinny jeans and look like ice and shadows, a little bit vampire, a lot rock and roll. I wanted the cool apartment of the Boyfriend, the nag champa burning forever in a corner, the crushed-velvet curtains (it was 1996!) and turntable; I wanted to have all the right records and have read all the right books; I wanted to be beloved and self-sufficient, stripped of all my girlish wants and sappy needs. I wanted to ride off into the sunset on my own goddamn motorcycle forever and ever and over again on a road paved with all the broken hearts I left in my wake.
Possibly you don’t care about Shakespeare and Seattle winters and the kinds of apartments grunge-reared teenagers longed for in days of yore, or the broad back of the Boyfriend against your cheek while the rain comes down around you in sheets, laughing with your heart in your throat. I liked trouble when I was your age, liked it a lot, trouble and bad seeds; maybe your heart travels in different waters. Maybe your Boyfriend is lodged in the likeness of, as you say, the nice-looking, popular boys. Your Boyfriend smells of sea and salt and has eyes as clear as glass chips gazing forever into the middle distance like a Boyfriend in a cologne ad. Your Boyfriend is good at sports, the long muscles of his back moving gracefully under his shirts; your Boyfriend wears clothes like people on television; your Boyfriend is good with horses or on the soccer team or really fucking rich: You know your Boyfriend better than I do. You want me to tell you what’s wrong with you, dear Confusion, but I’m not going to, because there’s nothing wrong with you at all.
I think what you’re really asking me is what kind of person do you need to be to draw the Boyfriend to you, and that’s a question I can’t answer, either, because if there is one thing I have learned in my increasingly long life, it’s that there is nothing on this planet you can do to make another person fall in love with you. You can spend years figuring out what it is you think they want and put quite a lot of work into making yourself that person, and they will turn around and leave you for someone the absolute opposite of everything they said they were looking for, not that I know this from personal experience. You can be a cantankerous old bitch determined to spend the rest of your life a spinster and then oops meet someone who falls for you, clunk, like a stone, and uproots all your nice, tidy plans, not that I know anything about that, eith
er. Love is not a thing you can cause to happen; it’s a force with its own projects and designs. And I am telling you this, Confusion, because I wonder how much of what you want from your Boyfriend is simply what you want for yourself.
No other person can answer the question of you. I’ll be honest, I don’t know anybody who hasn’t had to learn this lesson the hard way. It’s a lot to ask of another person, that they fill an untraveled landscape in your heart where only you know how to map the way. So ask yourself this: What is it that you want other than to be loved? Who is the person you want to become? There are a million things you can do that do not require anyone to fall in love with you. You can be a botanist or a race-car driver; you can take yourself to the movies; you can write novels, learn photography, move to a big city, move to the middle of the woods. You can find friends who don’t say shitty stuff to you about whether or not you can be loved. You can drink coffee in the early mornings and watch the sun come up over the mountains. You can run a marathon. You can sit around all day and eat ice cream and watch silly television shows. You can teach yourself another language or ballet dancing or music production or astrophysics or cosmetology. You can become a doctor or an English teacher or a sea-captain (I have known several; I assure you sea-captain is a real job). You can build a house. You can write bad poetry until your poetry comes out kind of decent. You can teach yourself to never be lonely alone.
And for me, that turned out to be the trick, in the end. Not to meet the person who would make me right but to find the person I had wanted to be all along. Which is not to say I’ve gotten there; it’s just to say that after all this time I have some idea of where I’m going. I can’t ride a motorcycle to save my life. I am not good at everything the first time I try it. I know some lines from Hamlet and a scatter of quotes from the better-known comedies. I own several pairs of perfectly broken-in black boots and stomp about in them to my satisfaction. I like being alone, a lot. I write terrible poetry and pretty good books and I never did learn to play the guitar and I am for all intents and purposes tone-deaf and I get stage fright anyway. I read On the Road repeatedly to impress potential Boyfriends until I realized On the Road is really fucking boring and doesn’t have any girls in it and I wanted to drive the car myself. I did drive the car myself. I let go of trouble, mostly. I still love the rain and I still think about that apartment of my teenage dreamscape, even though I live a different life now in a different city. I cry a lot and I am terrified of the future. I am writing another book. It is not a love story.
I wish I could tell you everything will be okay, dear heart, but the truth is, all I want is for someone with authority and clairvoyance to tell me that everything will be okay. I can’t tell you anything about what will happen next. But I can tell you that the only thing you have control over is the person you become. So put your boots on, baby girl, and go out into the world. I got your back.
Love,
P.S. It is completely, 100 percent possible to be flat as a board your whole life and still be adored. I promise.
I make the decision then, to be brave, where once I was timid. To be a different person, a better person.
—The Black Key, Amy Ewing
Dear Heartbreak,
Everyone has the wrong idea about you. They think you’re a thing, a feeling. But I know the truth. I know it from the weeks I spent staring at the wall with dry eyes because I knew blinking would just create more tears. I know because of all the times I fantasized about holding you one last time. You’re a person. A person with chocolate eyes and hair the color of night. You’re arms that used to hold me together when my world was falling apart. Now I’m left all alone with my broken pieces. Desperately trying to replace your arms with my own. It’s not like you didn’t warn me. Even before we got together you warned me you would break me. You warned me how you would end me. I should have realized that you didn’t see a future with me when we weren’t even together yet and you were thinking of the end.
Words will never be able to describe the pain and the insecurity after being left. So many questions are left unanswered. For all the trouble, I wouldn’t change a thing. At night when it’s safe to dream, I run through all my favorite memories. The evenings we spent tangled together. It wasn’t sexual—we just enjoyed being in contact and cuddling together. The times I spent in the kitchen watching you work in your element. Those were some of my favorite memories of you. When you looked happy and focused. The stress seemed to leave you and you were free to be yourself. I was never happier than when I was with you. I knew in the deepest corner of my mind that we wouldn’t work. How could we? After two breakups already I knew we had issues, but I was devoted to trying to work them out with you. You didn’t feel the same. After all, you are my heartbreak. I begged you to talk to me, to work this out. I didn’t want you to leave me. But you did. Being friends is bullshit. It’s impossible. How could I stay just friends when I’m absolutely in love with you?
My heartbreak. You don’t help me any with the writing you send me. The beautiful pieces that are oddly tragic, since I know their end. They describe me in a way I’ve never seen myself. As magical and amazing. Awe-inducing. Rendering others speechless. They reflect my own memories from a new view. Memories of lazy afternoons with orange light streaming in and outlining you in gold. My head resting on your chest as I listened to your heart pump beneath me. The times we lay together and I felt at peace. My jagged edges were soothed and all anxiety was suddenly missing. You can’t imagine the strangeness of that. Anxiety is a piece of me. A gnawing ache constantly in my soul. But you chased that away, dear Heartbreak, you made me safe. And relaxed. Relaxed enough to sleep in someone else’s home. Relaxed enough to allow you to sleep in my bed. But how did it all go wrong? Why wasn’t I enough for you? I’m so tired of feeling second best. Was it all fake? I know you used me as a rebound, and I’m sadly okay with it because otherwise how would I have known what it feels like to love someone enough to put their feelings and needs above your own?
Even now, I can’t share anything that runs through my mind for fear of it upsetting you. My own well-being has taken a backseat to yours. I listen to you cry about your ex. How she left you. You can’t see your own hypocrisy, my lovely heartbreak. You’ve left me. You read me your writing and it all speaks of forever and trying and loving and family. But you lied. You left me. You left me all alone. You left me and took my home. You took my happiness. This isn’t fair. None of this is fair. Why do you get to leave me and then come back to unload all your issues on me? I can’t handle all of this along with my own problems. There isn’t ever an opportunity for me to talk to you about what I’m going through. Why does my mind always look out for your well-being even at the cost of my own, when you couldn’t care less about me? It’s not fair. I’m tortured with thoughts of how I’m always second best. A second choice to you.
Sometimes I believe I can’t take any more. But I’m slowly healing. Slowly, so slowly. But every conversation is a stake into an open wound. Heartbreak isn’t how it’s portrayed. It’s so much worse. It’s devotion to a person who no longer wants you. It’s obsession and depression. Somehow, some way, I think I’ll be okay. I know I’ll always love you. I’ll always miss you. First loves don’t go away. First heartbreaks linger even longer. But maybe one day I will be able to remember you and smile knowing what we had was something, even if it’s gone.
Always,
Abandoned, 17
I AM TIRED OF TRYING TO PROVE MY WORTH
Dear Abandoned,
There’s a quote from Maya Angelou that goes, When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. It’s the sort of thing that seems obvious when you think about it—if a friend always shows up late to dinner, for example, they are telling you they are a person who will be late. To expect them to arrive early would be foolish. It’s the same with relationships. If a partner tells you, through his actions or words or both, that he is someone who will put his needs above yours, that he will take wi
thout giving, or hold you to standards he doesn’t hold for himself … believe him.
Your heartbreak told you who he was—he said he would end you, he left you again and again. Why is it so hard for us to believe them, to pack up our bags and say, Okay, well, you aren’t the person for me, then, instead of sticking around and hoping things will get better, that we can fix the relationship because we want it to work so badly? I promise you, Abandoned, I’m still working on this, too. I’m still ignoring it when men tell me who they are, holding out hope that they’ll change, that things will be different.
I wish I could say being hurt gets easier as you get older, that you somehow develop a greater resilience to it. I wish I could say I understand what I want and what I need now, and I only choose the right people to give my heart to. I wish I could say I don’t blame myself every time a relationship collapses, that I don’t wonder what I did to chase him away or what I could have done to make him stay.
For years I have lived with this secret terror that I am too old to be wanted anymore. Society says I should be married and well on my way to having babies right now, and society is a master at peer pressure. No room is left to wonder if this is really what I want—to be loved by someone forever—because it has to be, because it should be. Isn’t it what everyone wants? Being held in someone’s arms, being kissed before bed every night, being told they are loved? But in my mad desire to attain this ideal, I lost sight of the most important love in my life: Me.