Heartbreak Hangover Pt. 2

We met in darkness, your face lit with a smile. I could feel the answer before we spoke, could feel the weight of your words before you said anything. Two weeks of complete silence and I had created a completely separate reality of what would be, but when I saw you I suddenly woke up, remembered everything, remembered you. And I knew it was over.

Here is where I am:

I’m not sure, after today, that I have had my heart broken before. Things have made me very sad, and relationships ending have made me feel sick and miserable without a doubt. But my heart has always felt okay, just weak. Maybe. Again, this is all perspective. I have experienced depression and disappointment in other arenas in my life, but actually having my heart broken— I’m not sure. What I felt today was a cracking in my chest, a physical splitting of something inside me. Instead of all of your hurtful words pouring in, I felt all of my pains pouring out.

“I just can’t see myself marrying you.”

Alongside your defense, I was reminded of the only other verbal confirmation of rejection that would come close in my memory: “I am just not really physically attracted to you anymore.” That, and memories of hurt came flooding out, my own wrongs and hurts I have spread filled my entire body and I could physically feel the weight of all the pain I had caused. I remembered the driveway and telling some boy from a long time ago that we would never be. And I remembered how sick “doing the right thing” made me feel. And how I’m not sure that telling myself it was the right thing to do will ever make it okay that I did it. I don’t activate these memories unless it comes out by accident somewhere in my writing and I’m never sitting at home just remembering things like that. Maybe it was good to do that just this once, to be completely split open and to let the pain just pour on in, to let it fill me up, to drown me. The weight has since passed and now it’s time for bed and I can grasp the idea of being okay. I think being staunchly aware somewhere inside me that this was there the whole time has made it less surprising, though not any less miserable. We all know how much I do love being right.

We don’t owe anyone anything in this life. Maybe doing the right thing is being brutally honest or maybe doing the right thing is riding things out until something else rips us apart. Maybe doing the right thing is ignoring your problems until somebody else makes you face them. Maybe doing the right thing is some combination of all of this. Or maybe none of it. I’m not sure. I am sure that whatever happens is just another thing that happens. Every day something happens and we live and we do the best we can. We can carry these things with us, but the hope is that we are aware enough in the moment to not let those things control our path.

I will take it with me, but I will not take you. You are not like the others. You are not like anyone. Being with you was (most of the time) like living in some weird dream, and now that is how it feels, like a false memory, like something I just made up. Perhaps this is because all of the worlds I live in are just ones inside me, ones that don’t actually exist. If that’s the way I am, though, that is the way I will continue to be. But I will erase you from those places as much as I can and you will be out of my life forever. You are empty space on my walls now. You are not a reason or a motivation- you are nothing now except a character I remember from a place that never was. As a person, I will speak well of you, forever and ever. As a lover, I will never speak of you again.

And this is the end of another of Kate’s fairy tales, another ending to a another grand romance. Right on schedule…

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Joni Mitchell and the Art of Saving Sad Girls

My home’s mailbox is mostly always full, usually overflowing with coupon packets and credit card bills to people who’ve long since moved out, packages from important techie companies for my photographer roommate, new movies for Paul to watch, etc. My own receiving of mail has dwindled dramatically since I became a terrible penpal in the last 1-2 years. So, my obsession with checking the mail  has faded. But today there was a huge brown package poking out of the mailbox and it was for me — a book I’d preordered off Amazon months and months ago. Finally, for me.

gathered light – the poetry of joni mitchell’s songs

If you know me in real life, you probably know that Joni Mitchell is the greatest love of my life. This book is her songs in plain print and interpreted through different poets and writers, acquaintances of Joni’s, etc. I, of course, ordered this book long before I knew what it was actually about or what was written in it, who would write in it— none of that mattered. But tonight, as I’m scanning the pages with tired eyes, I see an essay from my very most all-time favorite female poet-poet, Kim Addonizio. I am captured. I am alive. I am remembering. Everything is back with me, even these things I have forgotten, the ways I have changed. It’s not a bad thing. That’s just where she takes me, being in this book talking about my Joni.

“That is: tell the truth about life.”

Directly referencing the tattoo scripted on my Libra ex-boyfriend’s chest in this essay, I am taken back to this wild little girl I remember myself being. I was flushing raspberry sherbet down the toilet in my college dorm building, singing “Paperweight” in a starlit hammock on a hot Georgia night, scrawling poetry in notebooks on the small hills of the quad. Those lines, only joy and Joni now, memory and happiness and nothing but nice things to say in regards to a nice person. I am crossing the country again with my Cancer ex-boyfriend “traveling, traveling, traveling. Lookin’ for something, what can it be?” — remembering the roads and how all of her sweet songs were singing through my blood hot like a good joke, hot like the way it feels when you know there’s a good thing that of course will be gone in good time, making meaning of the small things and finding ourselves in one another. Moving here to be with you and an inch closer to Kim Addonizio herself, just to be in her energy, just to see that she was a real person, to see if I was. I’m with my Gemini lover posted up against tree limbs in the safest city in America and that summer everything was the smell of donuts and the unimaginable. There was always love— and Joni Mitchell. Her record of my life, her albums the soundtrack to the woman I would become, her songs some of the first I remember loving, feeling myself to, knowing what it meant to be this person, in this skin, this little girl, a writer.  I know this is all a cloud, but the connections I am reading feel like fresh air and I feel like the past two weeks of my full on emotional/professional/mental breakdown are clearing up and this seemed like a sign, even if I know I bought the book, I just can’t believe things mean nothing. Things move too fast to mean nothing. You know?

Always a compulsion for me, writing was never a joy. But I remember listening to Joni Mitchell made me understand what writing could mean, how it could translate into empathy, how it could help make somebody else brave. Put your whole entire self into a song and somebody else will sing it, wish they wrote it, quote the lyrics in love notes or to their closest friends. Not quite sure if I have found those “gorgeous wings” just yet, I am still trying, I am still learning to fly, I am still writing. Just in case.

the last time that i saw richard

“For me, Joan Baez was Joan Baez. Bob Dylan was Dylan, but Joni Mitchell was always Joni. When I was seventeen, she was the angel in my ear. ‘You’re in my blood like holy wine…. I am on a lonely road and I am traveling.’ She knew me before I knew myself; it was that personal. And it still is.”

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