Happy Sunday. Heart talk day. It’s cloudy and slightly cold in San Diego which means we are all unstable. So I’m baking lemon cake, listening to Nina Simone, and spilling my heart out to the internet. Enjoy.

The first time I went through a breakup, I scoured the internet for anything that might make me feel less alone. I would wake up in the middle of the night with an aching chest and stay up reading articles about grief and heartbreak and how anyone survived them. I just wanted to know that I would too. I needed that reassurance. I had never seen it through before. It was a whole new war. And even though I made it out alive, even though I felt that I was so much stronger and better for having gone through it, it stayed with me.

For the next couple of years I felt as if I were at the complete mercy of it. I mourned that there was ever a time in which I did not know what I know now. The experience of it wrapped itself around my body like a second skin so that each time any one new touched me, I felt them first through those memories. It became a part of my identity. I carried shame that I didn’t tell anyone about. Shame over staying a few weeks too long in a relationship that had long since died. Shame over being the one who got hurt. Shame over not having had a say in how it ended. I could barely stand up straight if I saw his house, not so much because I missed him, but because I missed the girl who used to exist within those walls; the girl who gave her heart out like candy. I thought it would always be that way.

But now I’m navigating the aftermath of another breakup, and very different one, for I was the one to let go. I was the one making decisions in the dark. And the strangest thing has been happening. The pain and shame of that first heartbreak has been leaving my body at last. It’s pouring off my skin like water. Having the courage to end a relationship that didn’t feel right seemed to allow me to forgive myself for not having been able to do so all those years ago, even if I was just a kid.

This all occurred to me because I saw a house that reminded me of the beautiful one that I used to go to almost every day that spring, the one I never wanted to leave. And just as I braced for the impact of the memories, the impact that has reverberated throughout my body countless times, nothing came. It was like watching a hammer come slamming through the air only to stop just one inch above your hand. I could sense the pain, but I could no longer feel it. It left my body standing there on the sidewalk. It left me smiling at the blue sky and losing my breath over the sheer miracle that is the distance I finally feel between then and now.

some rambling prose

A bowl of oranges rattles on the table, green leaves sprawling outward like tentacles that reach out and yank memories from my mind. picking oranges and scattering poppy seeds. watching and waiting for beautiful things to grow up and out of the cold ground. I wonder if the poppies have bloomed. I wonder if they ever came up like you said they would. I wonder if they are all of my favorite colors and if they look like candy—I hope they do. I hope you get something sweet out of the bitter taste I left in your mouth.

Orange peels litter the table, their flesh devoured, my hands like predators peeling back layers of thick skin that took the earth months to construct, months to nourish. Juice slowly dripping down my forearms like hot candle wax as I rip each sliver from its lover. I let cold water strip my hands of their deeds, orange pulp falling off my fingers like tears that slide down the drain like secrets I’ll never tell—its cannibalistic what we do to fruit; what we do to each other. So spring will never not taste like innocence, where the earth is just beginning to breathe life into the things that we will harvest and devour the first chance that we get.

–mk

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