Our longest long-form yet

musings on heartbreak from the sappiest girl on earth

It’s 6:35am and I’m wide awake. I’m back on my original Pillowtown schedule because as I said, if I ever got a boyfriend you’d never hear from me again. I don’t have a boyfriend anymore so now I can write on a schedule like a sad secretary. Maybe heartbreak will make me a morning person. Wow that would suck. I’m wide awake and I’m aware of every muscle and bone in my body. Everything kind of feels sore for no reason. I am properly dehydrated. But I am okay. I got catcalled if you can believe it for the first time yesterday. A man in an NYPD t-shirt and sunglasses on the back of his head catcalled me from 2 feet away while holding the hand of his 5 year old daughter. It made me feel gross and alone and sad. But at least I am pretty.

Evan and I met in the fall of 2016, before Donald Trump became President. We were in the callbacks for an improv group audition and we did a scene together. We made each other laugh and we made the group members laugh and we were accepted into the group the next day.

The thing about improv is nobody knows what’s about to happen. Not the performers, not the audience, not even God herself. Sometimes you can be pleasantly surprised and sometimes things flop and don’t work.

For the past 5 years, I’ve been in love. For the last 7 months I was in a relationship. Every day of that relationship was a blank slate for anything to happen. Every week and month was improvisation. You never know what’s going to happen. I don’t have a boyfriend anymore. I have misplaced my boyfriend- has anyone seen him? He has reddish hair and blue eyes and we love each other very much. 

On nights when he wasn’t sleeping here, I’d let cleanish clothes accumulate on his side of the bed. I jokingly referred to it as my placeholder boyfriend. A big long pile of clothes roughly in the shape of a man but with no ability to make me laugh or cry. I’m staring at my placeholder boyfriend now, it’s full of sweatshirts and socks and a ripped pair of jeans. I’ll put the clothes away today.

My first real relationship ended in my first real breakup. In an attempt for the first time to not overshare on the most intimately beautifully tragic moment of my life thus far, I’ll just try to speak to how I’m feeling now.

I don’t think the love ever goes away. This is me saying this on day 2 of my newly single life but I have a feeling there are different loves for different people and they sit next to each other holding hands in the squishiest part of the brain. I have so much love for this man and I don’t know where to put it. I’m a kid walking around on the playground with a handful of sand from the sandbox and I’m trying not to let it spill. I made castles with it and moats and pyramids and now it’s slipping through my fingers into tiny grains and I can’t pick up the pieces. I want my mom and I want to go home.

When you go through a breakup, a few things happen. You stop saying goodnight, you stop saying I love you, you stop asking them what they want to get for dinner. You can’t go to their house or see their roommates or make plans. Evan and I talked about maybe getting married one day. Our last conversation was about whether or not we’d be able to see each other again and be okay about it.

The irony of it is that I’m the hottest and smartest I’ve ever been in my life. And that doesn’t matter. Relationships can fail even if you are, as I mentioned, so hot and so smart. And so funny. I will continue to be all those things and I’ll add that with all my upcoming free time I’m going to start taking dance classes again. Or maybe I will run away and join the circus. Oh another idea is I can finally do van life now. Still don’t want to, but technically now I can.

I remember so little from my years studying Philosophy in school. But I will never forget the stoics. Essentially, the stoics were a bunch of lonely old men. Their main idea was- don’t fall in love don’t have sex don’t have kids becauase if you lose any of those things you will be so sad. Oh no, they had a point. But fuck that. My biggest leap was my hardest fall and I’m still alive. I’ve been learning to love myself so much more and that allowed me to love someone else so deeply, and I would never undo that. And I’m not alone. I have the best friends and family and roughly 24,000 restaurants in this city to keep me afloat. 

Maybe Evan and I will be friends again one day and maybe we will grow apart. Nobody knows what’s next for either of us. We’re all just making it up as we go.