How To Handle Heartbreak

The First Night

For starters, turn on the television. Flip past anything with human beings interacting with each other. Settle on the Food Network. Watch Rachael ray make 30 minutes of dpressing chili. Wish you had the strength to leave your bed. Your stomach is oddly light, full of stones that weigh nothing. You sleep with your eyes open that night, tears drying on your cheeks. The light from the street lamp casts a long beam across your floor and you think before you go to sleep that you look like a painting, motionless, serene.

When’s the last time.

It’s been a sec. I haven’t done this in a long time, so now I will do this more often. Here’s a little ditty about some things I’ve been thinking about. I’m re-working my thesis after an inspiring conversation. I am in love with a bike. I’m not sure what San Francisco has done to me but I think it’s ok.

You never know how much it’s going to hurt until it actually happens. You expect romance novel bosom-heaving, throwing yourself face down into a pile of satin pillows, heart beating madly against your ribcage, dying to get out. Perhaps you need chocolates, potato chips, things to throw. You want to smash plates or stab a pillow just to watch the feathers fly about your head in slow motion.

Heartbreak is not this dramatic. It’s a quiet, slow pain. It takes a while to reach your heart. It starts in your stomach, a numbness that spreads to your extremties until you feel as if your head has removed itself from your body, floating free above the stem of your neck. You spend an hour or so wandering around your apartment chasing it, watching it bob on an invisible thermal just beyond your grasp. This feeling takes over each room slowly, filling the space with huge gray thunderclouds, pushing you out slowly until you’re clutching the walls. The only place you’re comfortable is the cool porcelain of the bathtub, the door to the bathroom closed behind you, the lights out. Sit in the bathtub. It feels strange at first. You’re not supposed to be in the tub with your clothes on. Something about this is familiar. Your mind wanders to bad metaphors about the womb, but you know that’s not it. The bathroom is quiet. The tub is cool. The space inside the bathtub with the curtain drawn is manageable. Here you can quietly sift through your emotions, take stock of your dignity. Moments that replay on an endless loop on a jumbo screen are minaturized, compressed into teensy moving figures like ants, images on a dollhouse television set.

You want to sleep in the bathtub. You can work from home from the bathtub, the cord of your computer stretching like a tightwire across your living room floor, snaking under the closed door. You can peck away at the computer with a renewed spirit, taking phone calls, hoping that no one hears the strange echo of your bathroom. A pillow would help. Your body starts to mold to its countours.  Bottles of half-empty shampoo form a cityscape on the edge. The light that filters in from the window is weird and clear and throws everything into focus.

Stay in the tub until the clouds retreat, until you no longer feel the need to belly across the floor, dodging memories. Stay in the tub until you know it’s safe to be outside again.