This piece was written a few years ago, when I was in it. It’s poetic. Sometimes grief can make one poetic.

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Unloving you

In the end, they were just two strangers, who knew everything about each other. I know how it goes. This is for the people who silently remove pictures and silently grieve about what they lost. It’s ok to be silent just as long as you find outlets to speak out loud. Here’s my piece on breaking up. I want to share my experience about the collective, years of doing it with different types of people.

There are many stages. The first stage is shock, and a lot of crying. Crying when you have time and crying when it’s inconvenient- walking at the park, driving. There’s a stage where it hurts the most- literally physically hurts. There’s an aching in your chest and upper abdomen that won’t go away. There may be times when it’s hard to sleep and hard to wake up.

And times where you reach out to everyone you know just to talk about it. You talk about it incessantly to your loved ones, you talk about it to yourself. You might even find yourself reliving every memory in search of what went wrong. You indulge in morbid thoughts about the other person, yourself, your future.

The relationship is on your mind nearly all of the time. You struggle to move on with your life; doing things like working, exercising, going out with your friends all the while in the back of your mind you’re still thinking. The thinking turns into sadness. And you’re sad.

You might actively avoid triggers and throw away gifts and pictures and people related to the ended relationship. As the days go by, you slowly stop talking about it with your friends. That doesn’t mean you stop talking to yourself about it.

Your days slowly become filled with other tasks, but in the lull of things, you still think about the other person.  And memories triggered by outside or inside your brain become the backdrop to your mind.  The sadness ensues and eventually the volume drops. You find yourself being able to think about the ended relationship with a sort of distance. A quiet acceptance. 

At some point in time, you begin to move on.  Your mind isn’t as muddled and your thoughts aren’t as loud.  Then one day, hopefully soon, you’re able to go weeks to months to never thinking about that person.  All the while you lose contact with them. All the while you become strangers. And everything that filled you up becomes a void whether you like it or not. 

If you were to ask me at what point in the timeline I am in, I’d say I’m swimming through everything in the middle. This isn’t about me though. It’s about a shared experience and saying you’re not alone if you’ve gone through or are silently going through any or all of these experiences. Even if you can only relate to one experience, point of fact is: that you’re not alone. Lonely, probably. But somewhere out there someone’s in the same boat. And I hope that this helps you feel better.

The art and collective human experience of unloving you. I’ll delete you as many times as I need to.