fallen apostate

How to succeed in heartbreak without really trying.

First, do nothing. Become one with your couch.

Eating whole stacks of Oreo’s like leaning towers of feelings.

Watch Jane Austen adaptations until your eyes become raisins.

Relish in Colin Firth emerging from the lake in a white shirt.

If you must do something, drink. But keep it classy.

Put your cheap wine in a glass, you aren’t a pirate.

Talk to yourself.

Talk to yourself in the mirror, on public transportation, in the middle of the fountain at the mall.

Because there are things you never got to say and you don’t have to swallow them.

Join Tinder.

Make your profile picture a model and talk to no one.

Just keep swiping until you get carpal tunnel.

That way, you can reject 50 people a minute and it feels like killing ants, with abs.

Kiss as many people as you need to get the stamp of her lips off of your brain.

Go to museums, realize other things have history too.

Play hide-n-go-seek with your REM cycle.

Where you’re not sure what’s worse to wake up from,

The nightmares about your sides splitting open or the dreams about her holding your jaw like it meant something to her.

You might as well tape your eyelids to your forehead because at least you can lie to yourself while your awake.

Stay up until 3:00, 3:30, 4:00.

Brew tea with the bags under your eyes.

Write.

Write until you use every metaphor in your library.

You start using the same one over and over because there’s only so many ways to describe being destroyed.

But once you get there, that’s just the foundation.

Next, gather up all of the chinks in your chain,

Fasten them together, make chain mail, and ride that bitch into battle.

Take her name, the one that still hurts to say, and use it as a war cry.

Then actually cry, because there is nothing shameful about clearing your eyes.

Do not pick yourself up.

Do not be okay.

Because heartbreak is not about being okay.

It’s about remembering that you were okay before.

It’s about saying, “Fuck okay.”

It’s about taking all of your broken pieces and building yourself a castle,

Because I don’t care who you are, you’re a goddamned queen.

It’s about saying, “Fuck this poem.”

No one succeeds at heartbreak.

I built myself a throne room out of pizza boxes and empty Lunchables.

And I can’t stop crying into my Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup.

But one day, I’ll cry myself a fountain of youth.

Let’s go back to the beginning.

I’m tired of self-help tips and friendly pick-me-ups.

I drank up bottles and bottles and bottles, pretending their mouths belonged to someone else.

But I’m done feeling sorry for myself.

Because why apologize for loving until you burst?

My capacity to feel needs no pardon.

My heart needs no mending.