when it’s not heartbreak, but heart burn… what then?
The first cut is the deepest. The first heartbreak’s the hardest. It’s the climb. Or honestly whatever miley cyrus says, is just the plain truth isn’t it x
Isn’t that how the saying goes?
Well, not in my experience anyway.
I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced epic heartbreak. The kind that people shave their heads for. (Although I did recently get bangs because the hairdresser finished cutting my hair and then kept pushing my hair into the middle of my forehead like she wanted to give me a fringe… does that count?). No, I think the hardest heartbreaks are the ones that are more like heartburn, mini heartbreaks. Very slight burning cracks. Because if that happens to you enough, eventually you’re just criss crossed in fault lines, pressure points that break once they’ve been carved through enough times.
The people you almost, but don’t quite end up properly seeing. Because that’s just saying goodbye to the potential of something isn’t it? Not being able to see where something goes… and it’s kind of embarrassing, because you’d hope by being a full fledged adult in the world, paying taxes and FCK tonnes of student finance, (thanks dishy Rishi) you’d stop experiencing things like this. But somehow, I’m still here, over analysing my way into existence! It’s all copy, it’s all copy, tits all copy.
Lately, I’ve found myself in a sort of a something situation… I think. With a friend of someone I’d met through uni. Well actually, I’d weirdly already slept in his bed. But not with him. With his friend/ housemate. Are you still keeping up? It’s confusing. And I’m not sure whether this almost thing is now definitely not a thing because of the slightly strange bedfellow situation, or because of, well, me? We’d met through the housemate and immediately started speaking in our own kind of language, pinging jokes off each other, that went thoroughly over the head of the boy I was actually there to spend the night with. Talk about timing everyone! ! ! Take a bow timing. Snaps for timing. Standing o for timing! Great job, 5 star review on trip advisor, plz stand on my neck etc. etc.
We’d met and immediately started speaking in our own kind of language, pinging jokes off each other.
And the truly hard thing about situations like this is no one has really had time to truly fck it up yet. They’re still sitting there in the ideal version of who you think they might be. You make assumptions about who they are from the records they have, the books they read, the drinks they order. The little snippets they tell you about their family. How they behave with old people, cats, kids. In the early days, everything someone new says is dipped in this glistening, dewy day of romance. Of uncertainty. You catch a glimpse of a tattoo on their chest, and make a mental note to ask them about it later. Too shy in the moment, it catches you off guard, peeking out from under their crisp white working-in-an-office-all-day shirt. And everything is only made all the more mysterious, gorgeous by the things that you don’t know yet. You half plug in the gaps. I’m unrelentingly romantic. A die hard. And that’s sometimes a really painful place to be. Because I see the potential in everyone. In my brain I’m halfway through meeting the family, when we’re only onto drink number 3. And before you freak out.... I do this with virtually everyone I’m vaguely interested in. It’s a side of my brain that I cannot switch off. Much as I try to #beinthemoment. Have you ever tried to be in the moment whilst obsessing about being in the moment and are therefore very much in your own head and not in the moment at all? K, cool, me neither.
In the end we went for drinks when the original, first guy was out of town. He was on a comedown and in need of some company he said. And we had a kind of dream evening. I befriended a 65 year old Irish man who taught me the meaning of life and how to play pool. Then we went home and the beautiful boy and I cooked a really unpleasant meal which involved canned meat and watched a truly terrible edgy indie movie that I didn’t understand. It was both the fastest and slowest five hours I’d spent in a while. It felt luxurious. Old school. Like we could have wandered into any bar and ordered “the usual”. He was so effortless with people, like truly friends with everyone we came across. It was disconcerting. And sexy as hell. I felt float-y being around him. I talked about my writing. How it was liberating and exposing and I sometimes wondered if I’d regret being so open in the future. But why? It’s not like I’m ever going to work at a bank. He laughed. We laughed a lot actually, about what I can’t really remember. And we talked about how writing something or photographing it is like layering something over the moment, not even condensing it... Because reality is actually very boring. But reality peppered with some delusion? Some kinda magic? Like constantly layering the present moment with an interpretation of who someone was, or what the day felt like …. That’s what keeps you coming back for more. Reader, you probably guessed it … later that week we went for another drink and followed by some uninspiring text exchanges later, it doesn’t look like it’s going to go anywhere anytime soon… And it makes me doubt how the day felt. Or how I interpreted it at least. Did I just hurt my own feelings?! Coming up with maybe a kind of alternative narrative? Rejection stings, even if it’s only in a very small, new way.
And the truly hard thing about something like this is no one has had the chance to fck it up yet
I think I like hurtling down the timeline of life, or the dynamic, doing the fantasising thing because really, all I actually want is to be a year into a relationship already. Where you know them and they know you. And if you want someone to just lie on top of you for a bit, after a long day of work just because you need to feel grounded, they will. Where you bicker, but in a kind of loving way. And you exchange looks across a dinner table because embarrassingly your parents are having a passive aggressive, end of the world exchange at an Italian restaurant over whether or not they should “move the car” because the parking is about to run out, and are therefore making the meal incredibly long and unpleasant, just for the lols, and the waiter keeps trying to pour you more water, when really you’d just like to pour your own water thank you very much, so they don’t have to witness the intense parking permit SiTuAtIoN unfolding, and your parents are virtually on the edge of divorce, seething at each other across a single piece of garlic bread, all just because they can’t remember the password to the parking app. That’s what my sexy fantasies entail, anyway.
And I suppose this mini heartburn hardly matters in the big scheme of things. Because I do hardly know him. And I probably won’t even remember it in a few months time… but right now, I’m doing it again and I’m still reluctant to part with the fantasy. It’s just my version of the story, though, isn’t it. I’m sure he has one too.