1 A Word About Heartbreak
The summer of 1989 cracked our lives wide open, a dam crumbling to the raging current of adulthood. The sun shone brighter, the air smelled different, and the ghosts of years past faded to flickering shadows. It was the first summer we all had driver's licenses and our parents trusted us enough to leave us home while they packed up the cars with bratty little siblings and jetted off to the Hamptons. During the day, downtown crawled with suntanned teenagers, and as July dawned, the remaining adults learned to shutter themselves in as soon as the sun sank below the horizon and allowed the incoming senior class of Grace High to rule Bluebottle Bay, watching from their windows as we danced barefoot in the sand and set off fireworks into the Pacific. Drunk on stolen alcohol and each other's company. Content to waste away beneath the California sky until our families returned, dragging us off to the outlets to buy school supplies and an outfit for senior pictures.
Call me cliche or whatever, but I wish I could've felt like that forever. Stupid, young, and free. With nothing to fear.
Then, I was just a child. A hopeless romantic prone to acting on a whim. Before I'd learned how it felt to belong to someone, in more ways than one.
The events of that summer were not events of heartbreak, sorrow, and violence. They embodied love and growth and happiness and bliss. Which, I guess, goes to show how quickly everything can go to shit. Call me cliche, but I wish I could've stayed that innocent forever. Back before I learned what it meant to fall.
They say the pain of heartbreak never ends; that you feel that crack in your heart forever. Some people manage to heal their breaks, metaphorical cardiac tissue creeping over the old wound until it only aches when you hear the song that played the first time you kissed out behind the 7/11. Some people sloppily stitch the wound shut with some other person, some other body, cramming the void full of those new, little things they can pretend hold significance. Painting over the jagged scar with some sort of self-improvement, "I Love Me" bullshit. All ways of healing in their own right, I suppose. All equally fucking ridiculous. Because if it's true heartbreak, that shit's there to stay. You can do whatever you want to cover it up or convince yourself that you aren't still broken, but that's cowardice. Real love leaves this huge, gaping maw in your heart. A network of cracks that culminate in a widening canyon of absolute despair and longing that only grows worse with time. To deny that fact is negligence, pure and simple. Negligence, stupidity, and fear. You can't be fine. You either break in half, wave after wave of regret eroding what's left of your soul, or you never loved to begin with. That's how I know those "work on yourself!", fake-smile, stuck-up, yoga butt, coke-sniffing Youtube influencers are either deeply depressed off-camera or all their relationships have been so shallow that they thought a grunted commitment to monogamy was the absolute peak of intimacy.
Maybe that's dramatic. But to be honest I don't care too much. I've earned the right to be just as dramatic as I want.
I'm the prime example of someone who lets love get the best of them. My love has built me up and broken me to pieces and stolen just the right ones so that I can't put myself together quite right.
And I'd do it all over again if it meant one more minute with her.
