my heart, a feverish pomegranate

In my keenness to show myself and the world that I had been chosen, I started to warp, pressing myself into a shape I did not recognize. Looking back, the humiliation of it all was in how oblivious he was to my striving for perfection. All the while I felt more lonely, more isolated, more removed from him by the day. Later, when our time together was over, and I finally admitted defeat, the loneliness would pour out of me as rage and despair.

The sad truth is that my breakup was as powerfully affirmative as it was painful. It ratified so many secret beliefs I held about myself: that I was especially complicated to love, was doomed to be abandoned, would always be found wanting, and would always be alone in the world. This last is perhaps the most painful foundation for self-understanding. It is a fear that has long taken root in the darkest corners of my mind.

Since childhood, I have existed with a profound sense of longing, a longing that I construe to mean that I am somehow predestined to loneliness. When such a chronic sense of brokenheartedness finds itself honored in the unfulfilled promises of a lover, all that is left is the humiliating confirmation that one’s deepest fears are indeed warranted. I was right to be suspicious. It was too good to be true.

My own lovesickness devoured me from the inside out. I became nothing but the thing he left behind. Every unoccupied moment was spent dividing my entire life story into before and after, obsessively replaying the sweet times, trying to find the pivotal moments I wished I could reach back to and change, surveying the extent of what I had lost, the wrecked landscape of my new reality. For months, my resting state was one of grief-stricken preoccupation; vacant stares as my mind wandered mid-conversation. I became nothing but loss. No longer a complete person, I was just a brokenheart.

I looked like exactly what I was. A woman who should be dead from grief and rage but wasn’t. A woman whose formidable intelligence and creativity were just getting born, only she had no fucking idea what to do with them.