Being Heart Breaker and Heart Broken at the Same Time Taught me 2 Things.
Hope is often a destructive thing, I’m astounded by my inability to pick the thing I know to be good, best even. The certain love of a wonderful man somehow comes in distant second to the indifference of another man whose character I can’t quite make out. Hope sustains this bad decision making.
This experience of being heart breaker and heart broken was essentially holding a mirror to my uncomfortable truths; all the ways in which I am unkind and sometimes rather unlovable and consequently deeply fearful that I will never be loved.
I also know now more than ever that to be sparingly giving of kindness but needing it so greatly is the unfortunate human condition. I’m not as kind as I think I am, but I am so sure it is the thing that makes these experiences more bearable.
The sole purpose of this piece is to uncomplicate the mess in my head. As I’ve learned the hard way, the risk of writing about people who once featured in your life is to be misunderstood.
To the man whose heart I’ve broken,
I am deeply sorry I couldn’t see you. I was kind to you in the ways that I wish to be shown kindness when the heart is at stake. By being clear about my decision, swift, and only as honest as necessary. But I see now how it was no justice to your fears, your feelings and your humanity.
Thank you for the letter you wrote me, describing, so succinctly, the ways in which I ‘disgust you’. It’s no easy thing to swallow that I make you not want to be human. That I hurt you so much that you would prefer to morph into some non-feeling automated robotic creature that replaces feelings with algorithms, desire with efficacy.
I also often wonder if I will regret the numerous moments I’ve turned you down. I play in loop that classic Austenian question, “How can I dispose of myself without affection” but then I also think, in light of loving another man who seems to do just fine without me, I can’t seem to dispose of myself with it either.
I pray often for you; that your heart finds kinder hands.
To the man who has broken my heart,
Heartbreak occurs before any sort of formal split. It’s in the second-guessing really. It’s the hits you take in the fog of romance. The bets you make that don’t pay off. The hope you clinch to that wears you out, the imminent fear of rejection and the rage of paranoia.
The simplest questions are hard to ask. And of course, no single experience makes this clearer than the uncertainty of suspected unrequited love. Here is insight into my rather embarrassing Google search history early this year.
· ‘Signs he likes you’
· ‘Body language signs he’s fallen for you’
· ‘Lust or love?’
I scoured through these pages looking for answers, grasping on to empties like “ If he kisses your forehead it means he likes you, but it could also mean he just wants sex! Be careful.” How am I to use this information Google?
I knew the day would come when I’d have to reckon with the thing that i was feeling. The immense anxiety of you. The first thing that came to mind when I thought of you was love. I never did buy into the narrative that the things that come first are always the most truthful. They can also be wrong, in the way that first impressions are often wrong. There was too much ambiguity for ‘I love you’.
I was in desperate need of kindness. Yes from you, but most importantly from myself. I had been telling myself some bad, dangerous stories. I made them up to connect the dots between events and to affirm my gut feelings. It was unfair, and it wore me down.
Before the day of reckoning, I knew that fulfilment would take sacrifice, for me that sacrifice was the vast ocean of emotional courage I’d have to summon up in order to ask something as simple as ‘How do you feel about me’.
I didn’t ask. I reckoned with the immense anxiety of you in a different way. I found that it took the same amount of courage to get up, without making a scene, from a table where love was no longer being served.
