11 AUGUST 2024 | EMMA COLANGELO
His mouth made the shape “I don’t love you anymore,” but all I heard was a shrill ring reverberating through a void. Like the sound a hospital makes when a heart stops. The first step of grieving is denial, and I dove right in.
“I do not accept,” I argued.
“That’s okay.” There was no argument.
He got up to leave. I didn’t recognize him without his love for me. It used to fill his entire face. There were tiny wells of it in his dimples. I chased after him, hoping he had just concealed it too well, but I’d find the remnant glimmers if I looked more closely.
“We can still be friends though, right? You can still stay for dinner. They are serving gyoza.”
I wasn’t ready to lose him in entirety. I’d take scraps. Breadcrumbs. His old t-shirts he forgot to ask me to return. Whatever he was willing to leave behind. I’d even take obligatory pity friendship, which I could tell by the reluctant apprehension in his nod was the only type he was willing to give.
He’d unceremoniously leave. I’d stand in the doorway and watch him go like a girl in a romcom who’d get him back in the end. But then a girl who lived on my floor would walk by and ask me who the hot man was. That’s the moment it would hit me. He’d walk out that door to the arms of women. Other women. Women more beautiful than me. More interesting. Women more blunt and endearing like Zooey Deschanel.
I’m not a girl in a romcom though. I’m just a person whose plot doesn’t revolve around another person. There would be other women. So many other women. He’d write the lyrics “I don’t love you anymore, and I’m headed for the door” a few months later about that very moment, and he’d perform them at my all women’s college student center while eye fucking my classmates.
But there would be other women for me too.
Women I’d fall in love with, yes. More importantly though, women who forced my blinds open and threw sundresses at me when I didn’t want to get out of bed. Women who made me playlists with “Gray or Blue” by Jaymay on them. Women who overanalyzed every tiny detail with me. Women who reminded me I would love again. Women who showed me I am resilient and reminded me who the fuck I was.
And one day, many years later: my heart would break again, but it wouldn’t hurt as badly or endure for nearly as long. Not because it was less broken, but because I had already built the resilience.
Resilience happens when we survive our feelings and prove to ourselves we can come out on the other side. I think about those moments of profound heartbreak with an unusual fondness, perhaps even a tinge of longing. Our first heartbreak marks the first occasion in adulthood where our inner child confronts the formidable prospect of surviving the loss of deeply attached love. That feeling we won’t survive a heartbreak is wired into our biological desire to survive. So we are left with no other choice but to survive on our own. We survive by taking that love and giving it to our passions, or to the people who force us out of bed and make us playlists.
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