jeez, louise

It has now been one year that Jane and I have been broken up. Last year, on Friday, April 19, 2024, I went on a little field trip for class. It was a daytrip with three of my classmates to Jacksonville State University – we were in a class called Campus Ecology, which was about studying how the offices and offerings and facilities of a university influence the students who attend it. We spent the whole day there, taking a tour and interviewing the student government and VP of Student Affairs, sitting at the top of their 11-floor library and looking out at the green foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. The weather was really beautiful that day. I remember it being one of the few times I’ve felt that I made the right decision with my graduate program, I felt hopeful about my career. I remember texting Jane while we were there, saying all these things and how excited I was. See, she had always told me that she wanted me to be more passionate, more career-driven and future-focused. I was elated that I could finally text her something happy, that I was energized about my prospects. It felt like we were moving in a good direction. We had booked the wedding venue the week prior, she was getting out of a bad work/supervisor situation, and I was finally feeling happy things about my future.

So, I drive to her house and get there a little before she gets off work, laying on her couch and waiting like an anxious dog for her to get home so I can share these optimistic feelings I’m having. She walks in and her mood is noticeably nervous. As much as she would try to hide her feelings sometimes, I was really quite good at reading her. So, I probe her on this, what’s wrong and all that, and she just comes out and says we need to break it off. My memory cuts off here, shifting into this greyscale slideshow where we’re in the car and I’m asking if there’s someone else and she says no, where I’m driving away in silence and the only thing I can feel is my bottom lip twitching, where I’m in bed dry heaving from the sobbing. We had agreed to take a couple days to think about it, I said she was probably going through a quarter-life crisis since a lot of the reasons she gave me were about her uncertainty towards her own identity. We did not talk Saturday, but I watched her walk around Kiesel Park for hours on my phone. The next day, Sunday, we talked, and it was final. I had to go to the RA Banquet after and the mixture of world-shattering heartbreak and day four of nicotine withdrawal had me visibly on the ledge. I remember my supervisor pulling me to the side and asking if I was okay. I told him what had happened, and I’ve never seen that look in someone’s eyes. I can’t imagine what he saw in mine.

The past year has been filled with a lot of change and a lot of same. Jane and I, as you know from reading, spoke a good bit throughout. Emotions cycled through their stages, new information would come out, and then they’d restart. We had two kinds of rekindling phases, one was a weekend in September or October, the other about a month and a half between December and February. Between these, we would maybe talk on the phone once, but mostly, I would send her some incredibly saccharine letters about my feelings, and she’d send back one about how she was doing, how she was feeling, what she wanted. We had periods of no contact, the longest of which was six weeks, up until now, where we’re on week ten or something.

The past year of mine has been defined by my relationship with her. While I have worked to expand my social circle, meet new people, recontextualize the city in which we both live, all of these are, in some way, a reaction to her, the lack of her, the memories of her that sit in my passenger seat and hold my arm. Of course, the previous years of mine were defined by her, too, but the thing with presence is it has a way of obscuring those boundaries. “You don’t know what you got til its gone” type beat. I guess when I’m talking about boundaries, I’m talking about the outline of the self, myself. Self-concept, I guess? With Jane, the colors of her and I bled together, the border between the two was thick in some parts and incomprehensibly thin in others, so we kind of coalesced into this blob of variable hues and thickness. Without Jane, it’s kind of been like trying to separate those things out again. What of “me”, my identity, was part of her blob that just melted into mine? So, it feels like untangling. Untangling is a good word.

Thinking about untangling makes me think about the extent to which I’ll always be tangled. It would be foolish to think I can individually separate out all the strands of myself, diffuse the colors through the prism of therapy and new friends and make it so I was never jumbled up in the first place, never dyed. Everyone knows that you carry everything with you forever, every significant connection or moment is indelibly etched onto who you are or how you present, and the degree to which we can make peace with that fact is the degree to which we move on. And I suppose my difficulty is with knowing that she’s marked me up and colored me and tied me in knots as much as she ever will. I suppose it’s making peace with the idea that things are in the rearview, it’s the quiet heartache of pulling out of a driveway.

I talked to her mom earlier this week, on Monday, I think, while I was on a walk with friends. Her brother had seen me and pulled his car up and that intimately familiar and infinitely kind voice was playing over his speakers. She said “Hi, Ryan!” in the way she always did, kind of musically with a little downward inflection at the end. And it was nice, it was great, it was good to be remembered by her. I’m always scared I won’t be remembered. But it was also very sobering, realizing that this person I was so used to having in my life, though out on the periphery, was someone I would only ever interact with again by pure chance and with every incidental conversation, of which there cannot possibly be many more, she would slip slowly and slowly back into that pool of unfamiliarity and I back into mine. In other words, as said earlier, being struck in the moment with the realization that you are as close with somebody as you will ever be with them again. Every second past that is a slow regression back to baseline. She said she missed me, and liked hearing my voice, and asked me about how I’m doing and what my future plans are. It was really kind of her to treat me that way given the situation, but that’s who she’s always been, an incredibly kind woman. I miss her a lot, too.

And that’s where I’m at right now, as seen by my last post, being kind of incapable of untangling myself or finding my boundaries. It feels like every time I try, I find new memories of her that had long been collecting dust somewhere or old parts of myself that were hers, y’know? It’s tough because as I’m starting to focus on who I am and what I want and making that journey of self-love and a shifting self-concept, I find that a lot of the things I love about myself are the things she loved about me. And what I’m doing now, or trying to, is incorporate those back into aspects of who I am, of things I accept about myself. Not necessarily taking them away from her, but transferring their ownership, I guess. And also what I’ve realized is that tangling yourself in another person is not love or romance, it’s an appeal to a greater and more firm identity from those who lack one. Certainly, to love is to be enmeshed to some degree, to share things with others that you wouldn’t with anyone else. But I suppose I’ve learned that there are boundaries to that, too, and that there should always be pieces of you hidden from others, just as there are significant parts of you hidden from yourself. That way, when in an untangling phase, you have a place to start. This isn’t an argument for being avoidant or anything, more so about retaining individuality in a relationship.

So, where am I now, one year removed? I’ve learned a lot, changed a little less, and have made peace with the last year much less than that. I’ve ramped up the intentionality of my therapy heavily. I don’t want to be someone who hates themselves, or feels like they can’t connect to others without driving them away, or is incapable of having drive and passion. I want to be someone who I can be proud of by myself and with others, I want to be someone who can love fully and openly and without having one foot out the door at all times. I resist the urge to talk to Jane every day because I know that I am still me and could offer her nothing but the past. I write to her still, pages upon pages of incredibly inane shit that I just want to tell her, but until I can be at a point where I am proud of the things I have to offer, I won’t butt into her life. And maybe by the time when I do feel better and different and healthier and capable of being secure in a relationship, I won’t feel the need to. Maybe by that point, she wouldn’t want me to. That’s what I tell myself to maintain the distance.

And that’s where I can see my growth over the past year, that resolve and resilience towards this situation and these feelings now is much, much different than it was last year. I don’t feel as volatile or emotionally dependent, I don’t feel like I can fix everything just by talking and finding a new angle to approach things from, I don’t feel like I should force anything to stop the hurt. I miss her, certainly, and would love to talk to her, but the change in me is that I just know that’s not the best for me or for her while I’m still the way I am. I feel like I have a better handle on balancing my emotional and rational sides.

So, I’m doing better, I think. Mentally, I’m worse than I’ve ever been but I suppose in some ways, I’m more hopeful about myself than ever. I am desperately clawing to become healthier and better and I’m doing that for me. And when that’s a very novel thing for me to do, well, I can take a good bit of pride in that.