Phone calls were made. Family members were notified. Condolences were offered. A breakup is like a death without a funeral.
At night I took sleeping pills, which had been prescribed to my mother after surgery last winter to remove one of her kidneys. I remember the night she called me; I was standing in the frozen-food aisle of a Tesco Metro with a packet of peas in one hand and my phone in the other. She rambled on at length about hospitals and positive thinking and whether or not she’d be fit to cook Christmas dinner, and all I had actually heard were the words ‘tumour’ and ‘malignant’.
‘Are we talking about the C-word here?’ I asked.
‘What!?’ she bellowed. She thought I meant cunt. She hates that word.
‘The other C-word,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ she replied, much more quietly. ‘Yes, love. We are.’
After we hung up I stood a while longer, till I could no longer feel my hand, then I put back the bag of frozen peas, abandoned the basket of food by my feet and had wine for dinner instead.
The surgery was a success, but it took more of a toll on my mother than any of us expected – she retired soon after, leaving her younger sister in charge of the interior design business she’d set up shortly after my father left. She hadn’t planned on retiring so young – she was only fifty-eight at the time and after a string of failed relationships, she used to joke that she was married to her company – but the wind had been well and truly knocked out of her sails.
My sister and brother had been there for her through the operation, but they had their own families to take care of and jobs to get back to, and since I can do my job from anywhere I decided to go home for a few weeks to help nurse my mother better. In an odd way I was thankful I’d had the chance to do that, to pre-emptively make up for the care she was giving me now.
I probably shouldn’t have taken those pills, they were out of date for a start, but sleep would not come without them and I was desperate for it. Every time I closed my eyes I was met with a flurry of memories that seemed to lash against the inside of my head. They came to me unbidden: the good and the bad ones, the significant and the banal, and among the debris I saw fragments of a life I might have lived. If I’d just done this. If I’d just said that. I played out every scenario, every what-if a hundred times and more and I never reached a solution. Because there was none. Every morning, somewhere between dreaming and waking, the blurry memory of what had happened slid into focus and I cried anew for what I’d lost.
One night, my pain became palpable; my emotions were manifesting as real, physical agony. I lay in bed, hands on my chest in some sort of weird attempt to grab onto my own heart and hold it together. I was sure that it was literally ripping apart inside me. How else could it possibly hurt this much? My mind, too, felt torn. Pieces of it were coming away and I wondered if I would ever get them back. My body moved about as though independent of me, fists clenching, feet scraping against the sheets, all of me, every inch, agitated and incapable of rest.
Somewhere, deep in that night, the pain consumed me. The thought of being happy again was inconceivable. And even though all I wanted was to sleep, the idea of waking up, still here, still feeling this way, was torturous.
I thought about the pills then, in my mother’s room; there was a whole bottle of them in her dresser drawer. I thought about sneaking in there, returning to my bed with them and swallowing every last one. I walked through it in my mind again and again. And then I realised I’d been here before. A long time ago, I’d been here, I’d felt this hopeless, and I’d found happiness again. I couldn’t remember how I came back from the brink but I knew it was possible and that’s all I needed to know.
And so I prayed. Not to God – I don’t believe in God – I prayed to the only thing I knew I could rely on: myself. I begged myself to just get me through this night. I told myself that I would be good, I would be strong, and I would never let this happen again if I could just get through this night.
Sleep found me. And in the morning the fever had broken.
In the days that followed I thought about grief; how nothing and nobody can prepare you for it. People tell you their stories but until you experience it for yourself you can’t possibly understand. There’s no going around it. Or under or over it. You’ve got to go through it. It will hit you in waves so enormous that you are smacked against the shore. It will permeate the very fabric of your life, so that everything you do is stained by it; every moment, good or bad, is steeped in sadness for a while. Even the nice moments, the achievements and successes, are tinged with the knowledge that someone or something is missing. And the first time that you smile or laugh, you catch yourself, because happiness feels so unfamiliar.
I thought, too, how like an addict I had been, how similar this was to some kind of detox. I wondered how much of the feeling of love is chemicals and cravings and dependency, and how much of the act of love is habit.
Eventually, loving someone becomes muscle memory. You don’t even notice it happening. One day you realise you’ve stopped living together and started existing near to one another. The path you once walked side by side has become two paths, which twist and wind their way around each other, occasionally intersecting long enough for a conversation full of clunky exposition that reveals nothing about the characters. You ask what time the other will be home from work, what they fancy for dinner, if they’ve remembered so and so’s birthday tomorrow. They tell you about their day with no humour or anecdotes, just a list of events in chronological order. You cook for two, buy toilet roll for two, book train tickets, sign cards and RSVP for two. Your autopilot gets set to two.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that; in fact, I think there’s something kind of beautiful about it; your mind and body adapting so deftly to the presence of another person that the mingling of two lives, two stories, two sets of thoughts and beliefs feels effortless. It’s possible for someone to occupy a space in your life for so long and in such a specific way that their absence creates a very real sense that a part of you is missing. It is indeed beautiful. But when that’s all there is, it’s not enough.
I’d like to tell you there was an inciting incident, a reason we ceased to function as a couple, but it was more like a slow, creeping disdain. In the end, habit was all we had left, and I came to realise that what I’d lost was lost a long time ago. For almost two years our relationship had been the romantic equivalent of a zombie – a walking, talking, undead imitation of us – and it was finally being put to rest.
I snap back when Theo calls my name and I follow him into the bedroom, where he asks me what he should take; he wasn’t expecting me to remove the artwork from the walls or hand over our record collection. I tell him the truth, that I don’t want anything here that reminds me of him. I tell him it’s been too hard seeing it every day, and I need it gone. My throat tightens and I falter over these last few words. I think Theo notices because he doesn’t argue, he just starts taking the boxes to the lift.
I feel sorry for him all of a sudden; his actions haven’t been malicious, he just hasn’t got a clue how to do this. So I offer to help and, standing next to him in the lift, I see him catch his own reflection and deflate.