A journal entry at 4am 6/15/2025
For the last month, my life has felt like a waking nightmare. I used to sleep perfectly through the night, now I am lucky if I get 4 hours. I wake up twisting and turning my miserable body into the cool veil of night. I’m startled awake by another dream that they tried to kill me. Obviously, those are just dreams, psychoanalysis wise, I think it speaks to something deeper about how they killed my belief of good in the world. I think of how they must sleep so very soundly. Maybe with that red-haired nymphomaniac in their arms, maybe alone, but either way, they sleep. I try not to feel a dull ache, but I know they are sleeping so very soundly like the living dead.
Now I cradle myself, at all times of the day, between sleep, death, and life. In my sleep, I watch myself die, I’m guessing it is not because I am miserable or depressed but because there is very little point. It is all very Kafkaesque and slightly macabre. I am existentially facing the fall out, of falling out of love. I’ve begun to begin my nights drinking red-wine with strangers and end it crying on top pool tables and on porch swings. It is just that I am in such immense expanding & contracting (such-as-a-sea-anemone-in-a-void, nothing-for-miles) pain and I am desperately trying to find people to grab onto my hands and pull me off this metaphorical ledge, but no one knows me enough to, and I don’t really let anyone (except him).
First big heartbreak is shocking; it is like a penny in one of these coin funnel vertexes. It is loneliness and rapid revolution. I am meeting new people and kissing new mouths, but it is exhausting asking a new person their favorite color when they knew everything about me (though, I know very little about them). My ex-lover knew how I couldn’t ride a bike, how I walk slightly sideways and swam that way too, that a teacher used to publicly embarrass me for eating erasers, baby lullabies by Justin Roberts put me to sleep, the way I ate hamburgers, how I loved ice cream sandwiches (I can’t look at them now).
Dear Journal, last night was my first time touching someone new, I bit my tongue until it bled to keep from crying, flashing back and forth to my last time having sex, how I could feel in my body that they hated me, how hatefully violent (not just rough) they had been, how they kept talking about her while inside of me. I will never ever forget that psychological torture, and I will feel heartbroken and nauseous that it was the last time for the rest of my life.
Before this all went down, when it was a break, I thought for my birthday, I would send a letter with the address for an Airbnb, and we would drink dandelion & lavender mead, make love and it would all be okay again. We would laugh and say how stupid we had both been, that of course everything would be okay. How stupid those dreams seem now.
If nothing else, I’ve been writing. I’ve become a different girl, one in a sort of mourning. Not for the relationship, but for who I was before I fell in love with them. I drink black coffee in the morning; I try to read and finish a book every two days. Right now, it is The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong. I wear plum lipstick & tomato/mango perfume every day, even when I am laying at home in bed. I do yoga ritualistically, I smoke cigarettes like they are water, I drink red-wine nearly every night and I rarely sleep. Instead, someone new will learn who I am now, a very different woman. I once in a great while wonder if they must miss me, must wonder how I am doing, must wonder if the dragonfly in my fluttering heart has been caught. I mean God, I was wild. Yes, I loved managing money, my job and school (all the things I held close & were proud of, they hated) but I used to run barefoot into freezing water, dreamt of changing the world with my prose, and used to talk to the moon at the pier. I mean, I really dreamt of the soul of it all. In a lot of ways, the wild (and the loneliness) in me won’t go away, again why I write & write. I thought he saw it, I was wrong.
In a lot of ways, they will never love very deeply. Not like I do at least. Maybe they did with their first love, but all the love & good in his body has fallen away, & been replaced with sin. I was about to say that he is a shell of love but no, he is the shadow, the very connotation, the cruelty in all the unloved, and the once broken.
This journal though, is not about him, it is about me. It is about what I took from it all, what I get to learn, and who I got to become. It would be paradoxical to pretend the relationship itself brought me anything but pain. [two paragraphs redacted] I know I hurt them; I can own that. I had patterns too, but they were reactive, not active. I did not deserve this. I think they know it too.
Whether or not they realized it, I was an orb of energy so bright, beautiful and filled with love. I was beauty. When it ended, I had fallen apart, but god, when I first fell in love with him, it was beauty. I giggled into the night, felt like I was a little kid, with only one friend in the world, and it was all I needed. I looked into their face, their perfect eyes, and I saw magenta, and heaven, and him as a child. I loved beautifully, and he tried to convince me that I didn’t know how to love, when all i’ve ever known how tpo do is fall deeper and deeper. Even if they never remember it like that, even if it was a blimp in time to them. By the end, we were an oxymoron, a suffocation, the light radiating. It was warmth, like wool. Rough, like sand. All-encompassing. It was bubbles & smoke, fire & water, the sun & a void. He destroyed me, and I only left a small imprint on him, that he will only think about when he sees my sweet sun necklace, or maybe his doc martens.
One last thought (as it is 6am now & about time for coffee)
I don’t know if he ever really was there for me. He was 3 hours late to the service, He was horrific to me the whole drive to Albany & first day and a half of my birthday weekend, he wouldn’t even dance with me alone in the house, he wouldn’t even try to write me a letter even though it’s the thing I wanted more than anything else in the world, they used to fall asleep as I cried next to them. They loved to convince me that anytime they would be horrible to me, I DESERVED it. Showing up for someone IS love, consistently, not just when it is easy. They once told me I did not know how to love but I did. Our relationship wasn’t love, and if it was, that’s not how it was supposed to feel. I’d romanticized our relationship so much that I could not see he hated me.
I think to survive this, I have had to turn into a sort of plath-esque observer, because if I stay me, (completely aware that he never loved me, at least not in the way I thought) I will have to remember. I will have to remember how he was the only one I’ve ever truly loved or has truly known me & I was just a small window of time to him, an insignificant blimp in his love life.
As he so casually (bluntly) put it, “It was a great year”