Notes on Heartbreak

Perhaps Joe and I can carry on loving each other, even when miles of air and experience separate us. Not in the way of wanting to wake up in the same bed, Or needing to speak to each other when something goes wrong. But as a quiet love that endures out of respect for the impact he had on my life.

Progress isn't linear, though. If you plotted it onto a graph, it wouldn't be this straight line up towards happiness. It would wiggle backwards, then forwards, up and down. You might feel worse in a month from now than you did a few weeks after it happened. But that doesn't mean you're not healing. It just means that we all experience emotions at different times.

Sometimes I try to think of a future without him, but it's like trying to imagine a new colour.

Love can make people want to grip on to each other so tight that they have to pull apart before they hurt each other anymore

Knowing I've learned all these lessons reassures me because I know that even if we've reached the end, I can't ever forget him, because how can you forget something that's in the way you move, talk, breathe?

...and this time it's a promise, to keep on being nice to her. To order expensive takeaways, and go on walks, and watch films that are difficult to understand, because this life could be gorgeous if only I gave myself permission to allow it.

I'll try my best to forget, but I think I'll love you for all my life.

I guess that’s how people go on, without knowing how.

Saying “like” is just another way of slowing speech down so you have more time to think, and loads of private-school kids speak really slow in order to do that anyway, and isn’t it the same thing but one’s dismissed because it’s been portrayed a certain way? Taking time to think is never a bad thing.

That's the thing about pain: we forget it.

It feels like the worst act of betrayal in the world, to have the one who's meant to help get rid of my pain be the one making it.

A lot of the time the only way to withstand pain is to poeticise it, imagine it as something beautiful, unparalleled. Why suffer for something ordinary?

Why do I sit here holding onto us until my hand bleeds? Why should I alone shoulder the burden of memory when he is so quick to throw it away?

It hurts when people criticise your ex because you’re still in love with them and, now that you have lost them, you love them more than ever. Now the only relationship you share is one in the past tense: had, held, tasted, touched, breathed, believed. You can’t face the memories being ruined, because that’s all you have left.

Women are never just women, they're the men they prop up and save.

For us, the house will stay how it was when we were there. In our minds it will always be ours.

If words are dead ends, then metaphors are doors that I can try to open up. When you compare pain to another thing, those that are listening can fill in the abstraction with their own interpretations. My friend’s pain was a bowling ball and mine is something like a tarantula who’s using my body as her nest. I can feel her pulling up my oesophagus, the lump of her body balancing at the edge of my throat. I swallow her down, but eight legs means she works her way back up again quickly. Fighting the pain is tiring, so eventually I fall asleep and when I wake up there are a few delicious seconds of quiet when I’ve forgotten what’s happened. But then I feel the bristle of her legs scraping against the pink smoothness of my gut and I remember. It seems like a fault of nature that my unconscious mind could be so cruel. Maybe now that I can explain the pain a bit more, those who hear me will share in that feeling? Take some of it away with them?” Excerpt From Notes on Heartbreak: The must-read book of 2022 Annie Lord This material may be protected by copyright.

I'm going to really miss missing him, I think. I wish I didn't have to forget how great he was in order to feel OK about what's happened. I wish he wasn't a 'was' but an 'is'. I wish he didn't have to be caged up in the past tense.

He's not worth it,' that's what they always say. But why do so many things seem to be worth more than women's anger?

Roland Barthes says tears are the truest language of love because they are sent from the body. ‘Words, what are they?’ he asks. ‘One tear will say more than all of them.

I thought love had to come from a boyfriend, but you can find it in friends too. They bolster me and build me up, and being with them is like being in a support group.

I have so much fun with them I stop looking over the shoulders of people to scan the party for men who might give me attention.

And he really did break my heart. It feels like the worst act of betrayal in the world, to have the one who’s meant to help get rid of my pain be the one making it.

Knowing Mary has gone through the same thing makes me feel less alone with my pain.

The end of surprises sounds like a sad thing, but it wasn’t because even if you know exactly how a person will react to everything, hopefully in your mind the way they react to stuff is a way you admire. There’s a security in that, waiting for the inevitable and the inevitable always being a pleasure. Love sits there like a scaffolding and frees you up to think about other things.

It seems like a fault of nature that my unconscious mind could be so cruel.

Was it my bloated too-much-plastic-cheese stomach? Or when I made him list the Kardashians in order of hotness and then screamed that he was wrong when he placed Kourtney so far down?