I Mostly Mean It

heartbreak without an autopsy: burying something without ever knowing what killed it

I don’t think about you every day anymore.

I want you to know that. I want you to know that I’ve gotten to the other side of something, that the missing has become a memory of missing, that I can go whole hours now, sometimes whole days, without the shape of you interrupting whatever I’m trying to think about instead.

This feels like a victory. It also feels like a loss.

Here’s what I remember:

The way you laughed at your own jokes before you finished telling them. How you’d start smiling halfway through, already so pleased with yourself, and I’d laugh too, not at the joke but at your delight in it. At how freely you loved yourself in those small moments. I wanted to love myself like that. I thought maybe if I stayed close enough, it would rub off.

I keep trying to figure out the moment it went wrong.

Was it the night I cried and you looked at me like I was a problem to be solved rather than a person to be held? Was it the morning you stopped reaching for me before you were fully awake? Was it slow, a gradual cooling, or was there a single fracture that I missed, a hairline crack that split into canyon when I wasn’t paying attention?

I don’t know. I’ll never know.

That’s the part they don’t tell you about heartbreak, you don’t get an autopsy. You just get the body. You just get the death of the thing without any explanation of what killed it.

For a while, I was so angry.

The anger was good, clean. It got me out of bed and into the shower and through the days that felt like walking through wet cement. I catalogued your sins. I told the story of us with you as the villain. I edited out my own complicity, my own failures, all the ways I wasn’t brave enough or honest enough.

The anger was a raft, and I clung to it.

But rafts don’t take you anywhere. They just keep you from drowning until you’re ready to swim.

I’m swimming now.

Some days, at least. Other days I’m still just floating, looking up at the sky, trying to catch my breath.

Here’s what I want to tell you:

I don’t hate you. I tried to, and I couldn’t.

You were not a bad person. You were just a person, flawed and scared and doing the best you could with whatever tools you had. Your best wasn’t enough for me. That’s not a crime. That’s just sad.

We were two people who wanted it to work and couldn’t make it work, and there’s no villain in that story. There’s just two people, walking away in different directions, carrying pieces of each other they’ll never be able to give back.

The other day, I saw someone who walked like you. Same gait. Same slight forward lean, like you were always on your way somewhere important. My heart did this stupid, involuntary thing, this lurch, this reach, before my brain caught up and reminded me that you’re not here, that you’re somewhere else now, that whoever that person was, they were walking toward a life that has nothing to do with me.

I wonder if you think about me.

I hate that I wonder this. But I’m tired of pretending I don’t care about things I care about, so here it is: I wonder if you think about me. I wonder if you miss me. I wonder if you ever lie awake at 3am, reaching for a body that isn’t there, and feel that specific emptiness that I feel. Probably not. You always slept so well.

Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then:

You can love someone and still need to leave them.

You can be left by someone and still have been loved by them.

Both things can be true. Neither thing makes it easier.

I used to think heartbreak was something that happened to you: a car accident, a natural disaster. Something external that crashes into your life and rearranges the furniture.

Now I think heartbreak is something you do to yourself.

You build a home in another person. You move all your belongings in: your hopes, your plans, your vision of the future. You hang pictures. You buy plants. You stop paying rent on your own interior life because why would you need it? You live here now.

And then one day, you don’t.

And you have to move all those belongings back into a self you haven’t inhabited in so long, you’ve forgotten where anything goes.

I’m redecorating now.

Slowly. Room by room. I’m figuring out what’s mine and what was ours and what I only thought I wanted because you wanted it.

It turns out I don’t even like hiking. I just liked you.

It turns out I love mornings. I just hated them with you because you were so unbearable before coffee that I learned to dread the dawn.

It turns out there’s a whole person in here, under all the compromises, under all the making-myself-smaller, under all the ways I contorted to fit the space you had available for me.

She’s weird. She’s kind of a lot.

I’m trying to love her like you never could.

So here’s to you, the boy who broke my heart.

Thank you for the sweater.

Thank you for the lessons I didn’t want to learn.

Thank you for leaving so I could finally find out who I am when I’m not trying to be someone you could love.

I hope you’re happy.

I mostly mean it.

I’m working on fully meaning it.