It’s been a while since I’ve been through a breakup. My last one, well last one that actually mattered, was my freshman year of college. It was with a girl named Hayley. The whole relationship was bad, it was distant, it was toxic, I was immature, so was she. The breakup wasn’t any better. In these recent months, I’ve been trying to recall how I felt at the end of Hayley, the end of Isabella, the end of Emily. These were all formative relationships for me and I can conjure up images of myself in their wake, crying and rotting and being pathetic. But the strange thing is, I can’t remember how I felt then. I can’t find the emotions. It’s a really, really peculiar feeling, knowing that something leveled you but you can’t remember how it felt. It’s like I’m a trailer that got thrown by a tornado, but I can’t remember where I used to be anchored, I can’t remember what the wind felt like as it took me in, I can’t remember the impact as I returned to the ground. I can visualize it all, but there’s no emotional weight to it, no memory.
A simple explanation for this is that it’s been too long. Hayley was eight years ago and the others were even further removed. Another part of it is I knew those relationships were transient. When you break up in high school, there’s an expectation that you’re not getting married. Sure, that’s not great to acknowledge, but it’s at least understood by some part of you. Retrospection hasn’t really lent me any insights into the human capacity for healing and learning, except for the fact that people are pretty forgetful.
My current breakup, this emotional era, it feels much different. I don’t think I’ll forget it. One, the length was five times longer than the others, but more importantly, there was a future there. A lot of what I’m wrestling with is this mourning of a future that could have been.
At the beginning of the breakup, I was very concerned with the present. The immediacy of the pain makes it hard to think about anything else. I felt her absence everywhere – the empty seat next to me when I ate, the vacancy on the other side of the bed, the oppressive silence of losing the person you spoke to most. I felt emptied out, I felt like less than half of a person. My skin would ache and burn whenever I thought about her, about how my arms would never wrap around her little back, about how I would never feel that particular warmth again. There was this fissure in my life where she used to be. It was really, really fucking hard to cope with.
As that initial wound started to close up, my thoughts drifted more to the past. I could fill the present gaps with socializing and exercise, but of course, that doesn’t just erase someone. I began to think about our past five years together, the memories. I’ll be old one day and my grandkid will be doing a project for history class and he’ll ask me what I did during the COVID pandemic and I’ll tell him I spent the entire thing with a girl named Jane, shacked up in a shitty apartment in Birmingham, playing games and smoking weed and watching Shark Tank. A lot of the anger I felt towards her at this point was because of that. Unlike my other exes, I can’t escape her. She will forever have been the person I spent the majority of my twenties with, there’s no getting her out of there.
The phase I’m in now is mourning. Not her directly as I was at the beginning and middle, but what could have been, what we tried to do, the plans we had, the things I was assured of. I’m mourning a wedding, a wife, kids, in-laws, family traditions, growing old together. I was just so sure that it was going to be the case. No matter what was happening in my life, I was sure that by the end of the year, we’d be married. It was my rock and my foundation and my tether.
So, here lies Ryan Kim. Here lies Jane Backer. Here lies Christmas with her parents. Here lies our children. Here lies the houseplants, here lies the little dachshund puppy and Mr. Puddles, here lies binch and winch and updog and stuffed animals and Dairy Queen ice cream cones, here lies a life filled with handwritten cards, here lies a dream of growing together, here lies coming home to her everyday and waking up to her every morning and making her coffee and buying her new snack obsession as a surprise, here lies the future that I thought would be mine.
jeez, louise 