Start by telling yourself this is it. This is the last time you will break up. It will function the way it did at the end of the last marathon you ran when you told yourself, “this is the last mile you will ever have to run in your life.” Then, you were able to give it all you had.
When she invites you to have break up yoga with her, accept. Invite her to have break up sex, but don’t put it in those terms. Code it the way she prefers (she never did appreciate your directness).
Try not to think about your step son, your broken commitment to him, the complexion of his beautiful, web-like connections to your soul. Think instead about all the worst things she said and did. Turn them over in your hands to see every unflattering angle. Let it distance you from the good parts.
Take your burning questions about the future to tarot cards and pendulums. Let the answers soothe you. Don’t think about how they know what you want to hear and will tell you only that.
Because when you invited her to belong to you, you asked the pendulum if it would be alright. You wanted her to travel, to spend time, to focus on what she loves, like teaching yoga and making art. You had fantasies of helping her monetize the things she loves and of creating something together in the world that would serve people. You didn’t mean to rob her of her autonomy, what she called her sovereignty, her sense of purpose. You didn’t mean to be controlling or to be the one with all the power, but that’s what happened, and so the pendulum lied.
Remember that dream you had when, while flying straight up with fists at the end of your long arms, you realized you couldn’t fly? You hovered for a bit then fell. It was the wind flying out of your lungs that woke you.
Think of yourself, when you see dozens of birds throng to the naked tree out your window, as flightless. Because there is no cape on your back, and you don’t have wings like they do.
You will feel more angry at yourself than at her, but you won’t realize this until later. Don’t worry too much about that. The physical laws you belong to will do that work for you: the planet will spin, orbit, and the system it’s a part of will do likewise, and the movement of these bodies in space will be measured in units called time. Distances will be travelled, time will pass, memory will be itself, and she will fade from your thoughts and from the spaces in your body where she collected.
Move your body as much as possible to help this process. Get as much sleep as possible, too, because that’s where you spend time resembling your corpse, and the naked tree filled with birds has a message for you that you can only open in that underworld. The tree can stand for the temporary nature of death, as of life, which, when bursting and flowered, hides certain things. Like the twitchy aliveness of resting birds ready to open their wings and lift off. Their whole energy proclaims the immanency of their liftoff. Watching them, you can feel it coming as though you shared their collective mind. And when they do, they will do it together as one dark, swelling cloud of beating wings and breath.
Blame her for everything at first: losing your wallet, skipping breakfast, having that extra coffee instead, feeling sick, making mistakes at work, forgetting to walk the dog. Bang your head on the car when trying to get in and blame her for that, too.
Blame her for crimes you did long before you knew her that you now regret: stealing money from your mom’s purse as a kid and using it to buy candy at the local convenience store. A store owned by the town drunk who was usually too drunk to notice whether you paid for the candy. Regret stealing the money from your mom and giving it to the drunk when you just as easily could have stolen directly from his store. The town drunk had a daughter and she, too, was a drunk. The two of them are staggering caricatures of themselves, metaphors for other things you resent and rely upon in equal measure: he is Time and she is Memory.
Time will trip forward looking, at any moment, like he will fall on his face and end, but he never does.
Memory will be senile already in her mid 20s, everything that happened turned to fiction through her most unreliable filter. It’s not that she’s a liar so much as she has no idea what she’s talking about, and that’s if you can understand the words through the slurring. The gaps you must fill in with your imagination make the resulting story a fiction, and this is fine with you, because it can be what you want it to be. It can be what serves you to let go and move on.
Think of how your mom worked so hard for her money and had so many mouths to feed, including your own. Had you left her money alone, had she had more, there would have been more for you. In fact, had you not stolen from the drunk either, in time, you would have still had what you wanted, and more of it. Let this logic seamlessly shift to your break up, and how you should not have let her stand for your mother, because then perhaps you would not have stolen from her to give to Time to get what you wanted.
And yet, what you stole from her and gave to Time created memories worth having. See how stealing from Time instead would have robbed Memory, perhaps forced her into an early grave. And stealing from neither her nor Time would have been better, you would have gotten more of what you really wanted sooner, because it wasn’t ever her, not time with her, not those memories increasingly colored by her unconscious resentment, the pain that created. And yet, you would have neglected to know any of this, and so.
No blame can be assigned. Apologize to Time and to Memory, give her back what you took, restore both of you to your full and free self-expression, and forgive everyone involved.
When the anger fever breaks, allow the sadness to surface like sweat only from your eyes. Because your heart, a winged muscle, bulbous and chambered, flew until it realized it was only dreaming. Then, in the dream, it fell. Upon waking, only an ache remained in the wing spaces.
Everything, each thing: the dream of flying, the blame, the anger, the sadness, the crying, the regretful parts of your past, the naked tree and the birds, the stumbling drunks to whom you’ve assigned too much meaning—they are necessary parts of breaking up for the last time. They help it along in its finality. They serve, each one serves, as a conclusion to a story you’ve been writing since you first fell in love at age sixteen. A twenty-six year journey from you, away from you, closer to you, and back to you.
When you cry, lift your face into the sunshine. The wide daylight will warm and expose your pain to the sky. When the wind wraps around you, feel your balanced weight on the earth and regret nothing.
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