Break up- how it feels when your world shatters
If she doesn’t love me am I nothing?
Her text says she’ll try to come to my yoga classes when she can. It sends me cold. My heart pounds and my guts pulse. It’s her casual tone that chills me. She’s still the centre of my world but I have suddenly been flung to the periphery of her galaxy, maybe lost forever in the freezing emptiness of space. Can you hear me, Major Tom?
I’m so exhausted by her absence and especially by the endless internal mantra of why? But I can’t sleep. I can’t sit still either. So I walk out into the winter night, out into the zombie apocalypse that is Adelaide suburbia on a week night. I feel like the last person on earth as I wander past the neat bungalows of the comparatively super rich who can own a house.
I did own a house until three days ago. The marriage settlement swallowed that like krill. Now I have two rooms filled with the jetsam of my former life. She returned everything I didn’t want and have no room for. I have made tiny sheep tracks between the bags and boxes I haven’t got the emotional energy to sort through so I can get to the sink and the bed.
I believe all life is sacred. I try not to step on ants. But the worst is stepping on a snail. I hear the sudden random crunch because for one second I took my eyes off the rain-washed footpath and stepped where I wish I hadn’t. I apologise to the snail with spontaneous remorse- “I’m so sorry”- and then I have to grind it into the cement so it doesn’t suffer needlessly. I am an accidental taker of life, but still a taker of life. I hate that.
Ironically in this period I don’t really care about my own life. I step out onto the road not really wanting to bother looking if any cars are coming. Who cares? I catch myself driving at speed where usually I’m super careful. I speed up. I don’t care. I don’t really care about anything. I want her and I can’t have her- so what does anything else matter? Nothing is real.
I’m still walking. I take a swig from a bottle in my coat pocket. If any of the zombies were even watching they would assume it was liquor. It’s not, it’s freshly squeezed breakfast juice. I feel derelict and disgusting anyway. I hope I have a dissolute swagger in my gait. I hope I look like Nick Kent or Keef in the seventies, or Johnny Depp as their pirate avatar, Jack Sparrow. In fact I know I don’t. Instead, like my father before me, I bear an uncanny resemblance to a Polish Garden Gnome.
It’s freezing but I don’t care. I have no umbrella and I don’t care if it rains. I am built for Polish winters. The cold is my friend. Women love my warmth, I seem to have an inner glow that burns through my clothing, my shoes, my possessions more quickly than other people’s. They think I am a living hot water bottle for their icy skin.
I am afraid of their icy hearts. The shards that pierce my consciousness with their indifference towards my suffering love for them. The speed they move onto their next conquest like café racers. They apologise but they don’t really care. They have another orbit now. It’s lonely out in space.
Who am I if she doesn’t love me? I wish I was above wishing. I wish I was like Guruji, the edition of me when I am The Yoga Teacher. It’s not really a character I play, it’s a being I become for those precious magical few hours every week. I can sit tranquilly on the mat and philosophise with integrity. I can be content, serene, calming and wise. I can draw meditations out of the air, command a room full of women to get down on their hands and knees and they do, unquestioningly, trustingly.
That’s not real life!
In real life no one does what I want, no matter how much I lay down for them. “Here, take the house, I want you to be happy and secure.” She can’t even say thank you in a text message. “Here, let me support you through the medical maze in a quest to rid you of your lifelong suffering.” She’d rather go back to him, the one who fed her ecstasy and filmed her hallucination as she clawed at the television like a cat. The one who screamed obscenities at her and made her miserable. How do I make sense of that? How can he be the one she loves?
Why should I try to care for myself? What is the point of exploring my dreamscapes in hopes of individuation? Why should I meditate and come into the Divine Presence? When I open my eyes I am alone and unloved. She has gone and she is never coming back. She pulled the sapling of our love out of the earth, killed it without noticing as she trashed my garden.
I would still take her back. In a heartbeat. Because I am an idiot. I am more of an idiot than she is. She at least is moving towards someone she thinks will make her happy. I’m walking on a windy wet beach, alone in the middle of the night with no reason to go anywhere, only moving because there is nothing I want to do yet I can’t do nothing.
I wonder if she will read this. Would it make her cry? Would it make her angry? Would it make her roll her eyes at my self pity? Would it make her regret her uncaring self interest? Is that even a fair characterisation of her following her heart? I can’t tell any more. I don’t know what’s real. I’m moving through a hazy half life of grief. She, I guess, sometimes thinks of me as she buys a new book.
“Be kind to your beautiful heart,” she said. The one she broke. If my heart is so beautiful, why doesn’t she love me? I know people love me and I have good friends. But I want someone to come home to, someone who is my home, someone who delights me endlessly. Like she did. Why can’t it be her?
Having found zero answers for my aching questioning soul I might as well go home and write down this misery. So I can share it with my imaginary audience. I want to share my life. Why can’t it be with her?
What am I if she doesn’t love me?
