Beautiful Advice About A Breakup
Dear Worth It,
I don't know whether this sad, difficult experience will leave you too
wounded and afraid to try again, or whether having had this one experience
you will realize that it is indeed possible, and you will go out again and
have a series of flings during which you steel yourself against fear of
abandonment and simply enjoy the moment, or whether you will say to yourself
that one time was good enough and now I know what all the fuss is about and
I can sit back and rest, or whether in telling what happened to you enough
times to your friends and your family and people in your church you will
realize that he was always dropping hints that he was already half gone --
clearing his throat when a direct answer would have been easy, darting his
eyes when they should have been on you, a nervous tic or a heavy-lidded
opacity of mien all of which were saying in their oblique but decipherable
language, "One day I'm surely going to leave you without a word of goodbye."
(I don't know if it would make any difference whether he was dropping hints
or not.)
I don't know whether he will find he has been stupid and cruel and have a
change of heart, but perhaps he is sitting in a bar right now telling his
story and the rancher he's talking to will shake him by the shoulder and
say, "You've got to go back, you've got to," and he will drive all night
through sleet and freezing rain to run out of gas at your very front porch
where he will stay for the next 40 years, a romantic penitent, devoted,
humbled, shamed by his desertion ... or whether you, after reading late into
the night and putting down your book and turning out the lamp, will grab
your car keys and start driving east, heading for his town, and drive all
night and park outside his house and wait for him, and when he comes out you
will take one last good look at him and see if you can read anything in his
face.
I don't know if you will take this as a once-in-a-lifetime love and hold it
dear to your heart or whether all you will remember is the leaving, not the
magic or the love or the closeness but only the eventual absence. I don't
know. I can only wish that you look beyond the leaving to the poetry of what
happened before, that you mine this for everything it's worth, that you not
concentrate on the disappearance but on what was there when it was there,
that you not count yourself alone in your desertion but ally yourself with
all the others who've also been left like this, unaccountably, silently,
without a word.
These things happen and they take a long time to get over but always in the
losing there is something to celebrate and remember: The priceless thing
itself. It was there once. It really was there. It was not an illusion. It
was not just a dream of something; it was the actual thing, the miracle, the
love, the astounding knowledge of another's heart.
Some people never have it. You had it.
I'm not saying Shame on you, look on the bright side. You look on any side
you need to look on, sister. Sometimes we need to rub our fingers along the
cold, rusted hull of what was once a beautiful sailing ship. All I'm saying
is, It was there. It really was. That fact will never change.
And when the hurt begins to subside, as it will, no matter what else
happens, you will still have it, this memory, this priceless thing that
belongs to you.
