LOVE: BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO

When you give someone your whole heart and she doesn’t want it, you cannot take it back. It’s gone forever.There’s nothing quite so humbling as thinking you’re completely over someone, then realizing you’re not even close.I don’t know whether you’re young or not. I sort of hope you’re young and sad. If you’re old and happy, I can imagine that you’ll maybe smile to yourself when you hear me going, She broke my heart. You’ll remember listening to music and eating chocolates in your room, or walking along the Embankment on your own, wrapped up in a winter coat and feeling lonely and brave. But can you remember how with every mouthful of food it felt like you were biting into your own stomach? Can you remember the taste of red wine as it came back up and into the toilet bowl? You can you remember dreaming every night that you were still together, that she was talking to you gently and touching you, so that every morning when you woke up you had to go through it all over again?  Only time can heal your broken heart, just as only time can heal his broken arms and legs. It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace. The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love. A heart can be broken, but it will keep beating just the same I guess when your heart gets broken, you sort of start to see the cracks in everything. –



The heart ruptures, its toxins leach into the groundwater of blood and neurons. The muteness of cells is suddenly disrupted; now they won’t stop chattering, replicating, and I in my sweaty bed, watching the spider cracks hover against the ceiling, ignore those cells as they spin and spin. Doctors become translators, tapping a Morse code on my skin, trying to decipher the language bumping through vessels and bones. Oh, heartbreak—such a fickle thing. Heartbreak is a squatter crouched in my kitchen, its eyes a glittery spark, finger over its mouth, hushing me, hushing,hush.You’ve lost the person you love, and with that your sense of purpose and beauty and joy. So lie there and feel your loss—and in doing so, become part of the cycle, too: afternoon to evening to morning again. Maybe tomorrow you’ll focus more on the sunlight than the horseshit.


Had I known that the heart breaks slowly, dismantling itself into unrecognizable plots of misery, Had I known the heart would leak, slobbering its sap, with a vulgar visibility, into the dressed-up dining rooms of strangers, Had I known that solitude could stifle the breath, loosen the joint, and force the tongue against the palate, Had I known that loneliness could keloid, winding itself around the body in an ominous and beautiful cicatrix, Had I known, yet I would have loved you, your brash and insolent beauty, your heavy comedic face and knowledge of sweet delights, But from a distance. I would have left you whole and wholly for the delectation of those who wanted more and cared less.

Since you walked out on me I’m getting lovelier by the hour. I glow like a corpse in the dark. No one sees how round and sharp my eyes have grown how my carcass looks like a glass urn, how I hold up things in the rags of my hands, the way I can stand through crippled by lust. No, there’s just your cruelty circling my head like a bright rotting halo. You didn’t make me suffer so you needn’t expect my hatred. That would be too splendid and important a gift. You’re not worth anything as precious as a shred of living flesh. I’ve killed your presence within me, easily. I’m cleansed. I’m dancing a festive dance of murder.

The end of love should be a big event. It should involve the hiring of a hall. Why the hell not? It happens to us all. Why should it pass without acknowledgment? Suits should be dry-cleaned, invitations sent. Whatever form it takes—a tiff, a brawl— The end of love should be a big event. It should involve the hiring of a hall. Better than the unquestioning descent Into the trap of silence, than the crawl From visible to hidden, door to wall. Get the announcement made, the money spent. The end of love should be a big event. It should involve the hiring of a hall.

Did you love well what very soon you left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache. Never so full, I never was bereft so utterly. The winter evenings drift dark to the window. Not one work will make you, where you are, turn in your day, or wake from your night toward me. The only gift I got to keep or give is what I’ve cried, floodgates let down to mourning for the dead chances, for the end of being young, for everyone I loved who really died. I drank our one year out in brine instead of honey from the seasons of your tongue.


Scared of something under their touch That will cave in, a skin over brown foam on a bad apple. I cram this thing over the threshold Into the cold and speechless house, Lean against the front door for a moment to breathe in the dark, Then start the slow haul to the kitchen. Steel knives catch the moonlight on white tiles. This dead relationship. Or not yet dead. Or dead and half-eaten, One eye and one flank open, like a sheep under a hedge. Or dead but still farting like the bodies in the trenches, Exploding with their own gas. Hair and nails still growing. It has the pins and needles of returning feeling in a deadness. It is a reptile in my hand, quick and small and cool; The flip of life in a dry, cold bag of loose skin. A pressure without warmth of small claws and horn moving on
my palm. At night it slips slow but purposeful across the floor towards the bed. Next thing it’s looking out of my eyes in the morning—And in the mirror, though my eyes are not my own, My mouth shows surprise that I am still there at all. Oh, a sickness that can make you so ill, Yet doesn’t have the decency to kill you. A mad free-fall that never hits the ground, Never knows even the relief of sudden shock; Just endless medium-rare shock, half-firm, half-bloody all the time. A long, slow learning curve. The overheating that can strip an engine badly, Strain it far worse than a racing rally. The fear that you will slow to a stop Then start a soft, thick, slow-gathering roll backwards. I want something that is familiar but not. To feel in someone else’s pocket for a key While they lean away, laughing, their arms up,Hands in the air covered in grease or dough or paint or clay. I have to carry it around. A weeping mother brings a baby to hospital, Late-night emergency. The tired doctor smooths the hand-made lace back from its face. He sees it was stillborn weeks ago, has been dead for weeks. He looks at her, there is no air in the room… This dead relationship. This dead and sinking ship. Bulbs lie, unplanted, on a plate of dust. Dry and puckered pouches, only slightly mouldy; Embalmed little stomachs but with hairy, twisted fingers, Waiting for something to happen without needing to know what it is.When it happens everything else in the universe can start. This dead relationship. I am this thing’s twin. One of us is dead And we don’t know which, we are so close.


What is the difference between love and obsession? Didn’t both make you stay up all night, wandering the streets, a victim of your own imagination, your own heartbeat? Didn’t you fall into both, headfirst into quicksand? Wasn’t every man in love a fool and every woman a slave? Love was like rain: it turned into ice, or it disappeared. Now you saw it, now you couldn’t find it no matter how hard you might search. Love evaporated; obsession was realer; it hurt, like a pin in your bottom, a stone in your shoe. It didn’t go away in the blink of an eye. A morning phone call filled with regret. A letter that said, Dear you, good-bye from me. Obsession tasted like something familiar. Something you’d known your whole life. It settled and lurked; it stayed with you.


Never offer your heart to someone who eats hearts who find heart meat delicious but not rare who sucks the juices drop by drop and bloody-chinned grins like a God. Never offer your heart to a heart gravy lover. Your stewed, overseasoned heart consumed she will sop up your grief with bread and send it shuttling from side to side in her mouth like bubblegum. If you find yourself
in love with a person who eats hearts these things you must do. Freeze your heart immediately, Let her—next time she examines your chest—find your heart cold flinty and unappetizing. Refrain from kissing lest she in revenge dampen the spark in your soul. Now, sail away to Africa where holy women await you on the shore—long having practiced the art of replacing hearts with God and Song.


Marriage is like fruit you hold in your hand, a peach or a tomato. You hold it in your hand and squeeze it lightly, then squeeze it harder and enjoy it, feeling the elastic resistance as something living, living flesh, a woman’s hip or breast, and you go on squeezing, not hard, for that is not what you want, but harder; you think of the fruit, and it keeps its shape and substance, although you are squeezing; you must hold it in your hand as something good and living which is to be there until the end of life; you lull yourself into the illusion that it will never burst, and at that moment it bursts. A small split in the outer layer of the skin of the fruit appears between your fingers, a few drops of moisture ooze out and the skin of your fingers feels it. Not until then do you squeeze really hard, from disappointment or surprise, or in the lack of restraint of awakening, and if it is young fruit and tenderly cared for, the split can nevertheless be very deep without the fruit losing its shape and firmness, and it other cases it breaks and disintegrates forever into sticky, fragrant, utterly uncontrollable dissolution. That is like marriage.

I stood back and let the ocean cool my feet and felt…nothing. Or maybe it was the end of love that I was feeling, the cool empty place that’s left inside you where all that heat and pain and passion used to be, the slick of wet sand after the tide finally rolls back out.  Love is the rug they pull out from under you. Love is Lucy always lifting the football at the last second so that Charlie Brown falls on his ass. Love is something that every time you believe in it, it goes away. God is closest to those with broken hearts.

Letting go, it’s so hard The way it’s hurting now To get this love untied So tough to stay with this thing ’cos if I follow through I face what I denied I’ll get those hooks out of me And I’ll take out the hooks that I sunk deep in your side Kill that fear of emptiness, that loneliness I hide. It must happen to everyone. The last time you make love, you can’t know it will be the last.Why is it that we can’t always recognize the moment that love begins, but we always know when it ends?  I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against the want of you...Love. Let me tell you about love. Either you love more or you love less, and the one who loves more ends up fucked. Love hurts when you break up with someone. It hurts even more when someone breaks up with you but it hurts the most when the person you love has no idea about how you feel.

Why hide your feelings to the one you love? Why love the one who loves another? Why give everything if only pain comes in return? Why wait if there’s nothing to wait for? I guess the answer is love.Ask me why I keep on loving you when it’s clear that you don’t feel the same way for me... the problem is that as much as I can’t force you to love me, I can’t force myself to stop loving you.You were blinded by the flames in me… Maybe I don’t know what love is, but it isn’t this.


He thought that this woman was his savior, that she had come to him at a time in his life when he life demanded completion, an end, a permanent fixing of all that was troubled and shifting and deadly. And yet it was absurd to think this. No person could save another. So he drew back from her and released her. What I want to know is this: If love’s so great, why do you fall into it? You fall into a puddle. You fall into the mud. You fall into the abyss. Sure, love screws everything up. Most stalkers think they’re in love. Mothers who kill their kids talk about how much they love them. Men who beat up their wives, it’s only because they’re so in love. People slowly suffocate each other with love all the time. Love is a weapon we use to hurt the ones we love.Relationships are like a dance, with visible energy racing back and forth between the partners. Some relationships are the slow, dark dance of death. Romantic love is mental illness. But it’s a pleasurable one. It’s a drug. It distorts reality, and that’s the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw. The second you meet someone that you’re going to fall in love with you deliberately become a moron. You do this in order to fall in love, because it would be impossible to fall in love with any human being if you actually saw them for what they are.

The business of love is cruelty which, by our wills, we transform to live together. Love, love, love—all the wretched cant of it, making egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and making the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.  To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia.Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning person holds on to you. You want to save her, but you know she will strangle you in her panic.

In our lives, we hunger for those we cannot touch.  After all, there’s a reason they say that love is a two-edged sword, rather than a two-edged Wiffle bat or a two-edged Fudgsicle, because love is sharp, it pierces…it can also cut, cut deep, wound, kill.Sometimes closeness isn’t there until you’re fucking someone and then you’re lost inside yourself but later you’ll swear you feel her love It was only pain. Since you went the sun refuses to shine The sky joins me in weeping for your absence All our pleasure is gone with you… Silence reigns everywhere… Oh come back! Already the shepherds and their flocks call for you! Come back soon, or it will be winter in May. Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell. I cannot speculate on what our cluttered mind will save— sleepy Sundays, or a  nosebleed after love. I know only the dying heart needs the nourishment of memory to live beyond too many winters.


I’m not sure why we cannot shake the old loves from our minds. It must be that we build on memory and make them more than what they were. And is the manufacture just a safe device for closing up the wall? Separated two magnets, swinging, circling, repulsing, attracting, wanting, needing, hurting separated by your vision you unchanging, trying to move toward me through the storm of my ever-changing emotions to leave me to loathe me to ignore me I will deal But what do I do with this love?  I thought how nice it would be to be here with you and then I thought how much better it is to be here with someone who wants to be with me. Once upon a time I was falling in love; now I’m only falling apart…

You’re going to leave me, aren’t you? …you’ve had enough of me, haven’t you? You’re probably so tired of all this crying and all these moods, and I’ve got to tell you, so am I. So am I. Sometimes it seems like my mind has a mind of its own, like I just get hysterical, like it’s something I can’t control at all. And I don’t know what to do, and I feel so sorry for you because you don’t know what to do either. And I’m sure you’re going to leave me now.