A Jigsaw Heart

Radioactive materials are measured by their half-life. Medications, too, in case of allergy. A half life a way to measure how long it will take something to dissipate to the point that it can no longer hurt you.

I know half-life of Penicillin. I know the half-life of Uranium. But what is the half-life of a broken heart?

Maybe it depends upon the severity of the break.

Charles Bukowski said, “My heart is 1,000 years old.” My heart is more like Indiana Jones: It’s not the age: it’s the miles.

It started out whole, impervious, and capable of limitless love. But that was many years ago, many loves ago, and many breaks ago. It’s not that my heart is more fragile than others, like some brittle bone disease — no, it’s more that mine simply has farther to fall: the difference between dropping a glass off the counter, and dropping it off the Empire State Building, not so much breaking as shattering into pieces. My problem is that I don’t fall in love. Falling is one-directional. For me, love is a bungee cord in reverse: skyrocketing skyward, then pausing only briefly at the top before plummeting down. When I love someone, or even like them, I am like the Tasmanian Devil in those Bugs Bunny cartoons. I am uncontainable energy, jubilance in motion. When I am in love, I am the top of the roller coaster. But, unlike the top of a roller coaster, I seem forget that down is inevitably coming. I forget Newton, I forget logic, and I think only, “it’s beautiful up here!”

I don’t know how many people remember their first crush or the resultant heartache, but I do: I was 8. Her name was Jennifer. It probably still is.

Jennifer was everything I was not: tall, athletic, daring, vivacious, pretty! So, when Jennifer dared me to climb the towering spruce in my parents’ front yard, I did without a second thought. I climbed as high as I could, from the thick, sturdy limbs at the tree’s base, to the sparser, thinner ones higher up. As my mother later put it, I “fell and went boom!” This would not be the last time I went out on a limb to impress a girl, and it would not be the last time I fell far and hard as a result.

And so it was, 30 years later, I had not learned a thing.

Janna was perfection on paper, or on computer screen, at least, for we’d met online. Janna was a model, turned singer, turned attorney. Her profile pictures, however, were strictly from her modeling days; a series of pouting, brooding, hand-on-hip pictures that featured everything but a smile.

She was beautiful, but in a way that was almost too orchestrated: waist-length dyed platinum hair, porcelain skin, form-fitting designer gowns, and bejeweled headbands. She was like a live-action Disney princess. I’m convinced she was not born, but drawn.

I’d come to our first date equipped with a plan sure to sweep any cat lover off her paws: I bought a tiny catnip-filled mouse, and as I walked Janna back to the subway, I pulled it out of my pocket, saying “I am sure J’adore’s opinion carries a great deal of weight in choosing who to date, so I’d like you to give this to her, from me, in the hopes that she will convince you to go out with me again.” Janna laughed and told me that she did not need J’adore to convince her, she’d already decided on a second date by the time we’d finished our first cup of tea. Oh boy, I thought, I was in trouble.

Two months later, it was Valentine’s Day, and I went all out. She loved Paris, so I gave her Paris. I took her to Le Cirque, took her to see An American in Paris on Broadway, and topped it off with dessert at her favorite patisserie. Janna was blown away. She took my hand across the table and told me it had been her best Valentines’ Day ever. I did not know whether she was seeing other people — I secretly hoped not — so I tried to ask her in most subtle way I could imagine. I asked, “I’d love see you next week, but I don’t want to be presumptuous. You could have a date with a hot musician, a wonderful architect, or a cute lawyer.” (I’m a lawyer). She gave the perfect answer: “I hope I have a date with a cute lawyer next week”, and again took my hand. Oh boy, I thought, I’m in trouble.

What followed was a whirlwind romance. I met her family, we exchanged “I love you’s”, I baked homemade French macarons for her every week, as they were her favorite indulgence, and sent her flowers every month. I took her to the opera often, though I was not a fan, and toured countless fashion exhibits with her, though, God, I loathed it, because I wanted her to be happy. I wanted her to stay.

We were approaching the height of the honeymoon phase, that part, for me,that is like reaching the top of the roller coaster before it begins it rapid descent.

We went to DC together to see the cherry blossoms. As we lay in the hotel, sharing a bed for the first time, Janna whispered that when she thought of the future, she’d “want to be a hot 90 year old.” I’d pictured my 90s like the John Lennon song: Grow Old Along With Me. I imagined sitting with my wife in a sun-dappled kitchen, lost in our bathrobes, reading sections of the New York Times through cataract-clouded eyes. I pictured aging gracefully, each wrinkle a memory of a past laugh. Janna pictured routine surgical touch ups, crash diets, and still-dyed hair. She asked if I wanted to make love, and I declined, because we were still getting to know each other and because it was only our first time even sharing a bed. I declined because I was now picturing a hot 90-year old, I declined because I’m a moron.

Janna’s parents came to visit a couple of months later, and Janna asked that I come into the city to meet them for the first time. I was honest when they asked why I worked on Long Island rather than in the city as Janna did; that it was difficult for an older attorney to find a new job. Employers want to hire the young, as they are cheaper. I was under stress because of this, and worse, because there had been layoffs at work. I whispered to Janna how worried and depressed I was, caught in a job I knew was not good for what she wanted me to have (a high-paying job in the city), and panicked that it would be difficult, even impossible, to find something else.

The next week was our six-month ‘anniversary’, to the extent anyone over 18 years old can have anniversaries measured in months. I sent flowers to her office, as had become my monthly ritual. Janna texted one of the pictures of she and I taken under the cherry trees in DC, one in which she’d given in and smiled. I came home to find that she’d posted the same picture on each of our Facebook pages, with the caption, “Happy Anniversary, Howard! I’m so glad we were able to share this!” She made that photo her Facebook profile picture. I felt that silly giddiness reserved for high school romance; grinning like an idiot and confident in our future. Even the stress of an awful month at work seemed to lift.

I had no photos to share, so I wrote her a poem and sent it to her via Facebook messenger, her favored means of communication. It was nothing deep or serious, just a rhymed list of the outings we’d enjoyed over the past months, ending with a quick list of adventures to look forward to in the future. She read it (I received the ‘return receipt’ email) but did not write back. Not to say she liked the poem, not to write any similar statement of her own, not to say thank you. I was irrationally upset, and texted her that a ‘thank you’ would have been nice. She responded that she was going to sleep.

I felt petty, needy, but most of all, worried. She’d just posted “Happy Anniversary” for all her friends to see, and I felt slighted because she’d failed to respond to a silly poem. I woke up after midnight, upset with myself, and decided to email her to apologize, and explain that it was the stress and depression over layoffs at work that caused my mood.But, when I logged on to Facebook, the first thing I saw was that she’d taken down the picture of she and I as her profile picture, and replaced it with one of her solo.

I panicked, and rather than apologizing, I wrote that I’d put a lot of thought into the poem, that meant for it to express her how much she, our time together, meant to me. I wrote that when she did not respond, but instead took down the picture of us she’d just posted, it made me feel like she did not feel the same way. I admit this was stupid of me. It was irrational. But her sole response — “I have a lot of photos of myself I like to share” — did little to ease my feelings.

One week later, she called me to say that I might not be a long-term match for her because I did not live or work in the city. She told me that the distance of our homes — about an hour from Long Island to Manhattan — was a source of anxiety for her. She added that we should not say we loved each other anymore, because it was “too soon”. She backed out of plans we’d made to go away together for Memorial Day Weekend, and backed out of her promise to attend my friend’s wedding with me the following week.

I assured her again that if we ended up together long-term, I’d live in the city and reverse-commute if need be. I meant it too, but I also knew that relationships don’t survive “you may not be a long term match”, coupled with canceling future plans.

You can sometimes sense a breakup coming, the way you can feel a flu coming on. You feel that first tickle in the back of your throat, that nondescript malaise, and you know what’s coming. It’s like that moment before a car accident, where all you can do is white-knuckle the steering wheel and brace for impact.

Janna broke up with me week later in unspectacular fashion, more tears than shouting. She said she tried to have a relationship, but could not; she said that my living on Long Island was a source of stress for her; she said that if I wrote a poem for any girlfriend in the future, I should be dating her a year before doing so. Ouch.

And so began my postmortem. I recalled and chronicled my mistakes. I spent hours baking her macarons. I wrote her poems. I wore my heart on my not-Armani-enough sleeve. I sent her flowers, just because. I was smothering and just too much. I was romantic. I was hopeless. I was a hopeless romantic?

I read a letter in an advice column written by a saddened lover. The writer had been in a relationship for 2 years with a man who never sent flowers, never bought her birthday gifts, and never sent Valentines. The boyfriend felt gifts were unnecessary. The girlfriend asked the expert whether she should speak up and say that a gift, even a small one, would make her feel special. The expert wrote back, “There is nothing worse than being forced to buy someone a gift when you don’t want to.”

Really, expert? There’s nothing worse than having to buy someone a gift? What about abuse? What about infidelity? What about, simply, feeling unloved?

The expert, I think, missed the point. The issue was not whether the woman justified in wanting a gift to feel appreciated, and the issue was not whether the man was right in feeling that being together was enough. The question is not which of them was “right”: The question is, were they right for each other?

That is what I finally realized. I spent so long beating myself up over the anniversary poem. It’s not whether I was right in wishing she’d responded, or whether she was right in feeling she need not respond. The issue was, we were not right for each other. We are all, each one of us, jagged puzzle pieces. The key is to find someone who fills in our edges, gaps, and grooves.