In the spring of my sophomore year in college, Hannah and I decided to end our relationship silently. The only break up I’ve ever gone through was the most silent and seamless end to the longest relationship I’d ever had with anyone. I’ve never really even referred to it as a “break up” until writing this. It’s not quite right since neither of us really talked about the need to break anything off, we simply just stopped being together in an intimate capacity.
Her father had gotten a great work opportunity that transferred their family to Florida— ughhh… fucking Florida— and that was that. Once Florida, and Hannah’s inevitable, impending residency there, became a concrete thing in my world, so did the space between our faces when our heads were close together. We stopped attempting to make time for each other, and running into her became as coincidental as running into my next door neighbor.
When she moved to Tallahassee, she started writing to me. Letters, like we didn’t have phones, like it was easier to not carry something that could reach me every second of the day, something she could put her thoughts into, then release, and put me out of her head, until my inevitable and desperate reply, thinking that each letter was a step closer to getting back together despite the 2,181 miles that stood in between the state of California and her, her snort when she laughed, and the way that she walked, which I was already beginning for forget. It was similar to that of a quail, I think, but it’s been forever, and my memory fails me.
The last letter she wrote me was an invitation to her wedding, 2 years after I last saw her sweet shuffling gait, and I never wrote back. 2 graduations later, I was driving with a friend of mine going through a breakup that confided in me her particular fear of losing love for someone, and I thought love is a fickle and multifaceted sentiment.
Love never, as Neil Young puts it, fades away. It moves and shape-shifts as abstractly as its definition, like a folk creature of the night as it changes in form and reasoning for each relationship and person you hold. And without failure or falter, like a real-life hydra, it refuses to die. It changes as you change and the amount of love you hold for someone grows and diminishes in alternating, unpredictable patterns as you grow older. And then you die, and love somehow still remains.
The love my mother had for me started out as parental. A protective, overbearing kind of love solely formed and held by the simple matter of my body coming from hers, and it slowly metamorphosed into a deep familial affection built up by mutual respect from one grown organism to another, years of friendship having built up. I never lost my love for Hannah. It grew old and transformed into the kind of love where the exchange of words, the sight of her face, and the shape of her body no longer became important to grow with. No longer founded on the aesthetic of her or the proximity between us that rapidly closed all those years ago in our college-minded excitement and desire to feel less lost in the company of one another, it was now founded on what lovely little remains I have in my fading memory of what we did when we were together, what it meant to me before I lived several other lives, and what I hope it meant to her.
i dont think there’s ever really moving on, just moving through. like constant emotional organizing and re-organizing and re-organizing
today i was able to take this stack of photos and notes and move it from one desk to another and that felt okay. and i couldnt look at them but i held them and moved them and it wasnt so bad
knowing they used to be on his wall and now theyre not was really awful. but it didnt hurt quite as much as it did yesterday
tomorrow itll probably hurt more. but ill just keep moving them
maybe next time itll be somewhere i can barely see them and can forget theyre in here for the day, and then maybe the next theyll be front and center so i can fully immerse myself in the emotional indulgence of the grief of knowing theyre here now and not there
ill just keep moving them from one table to another, then under a stack of other shit, then maybe into a folder or a drawer, then ill take them out and look at them and cry and itll hurt all over again, and then ill shove them back under the pile of random shit. but eventually theyll have to come out and get moved again.
ill just keep moving and breathing and feeling and moving and breathing and feeling and organizing and re-organizing and re-organizing day by day by day by day and thats all i have to do. nothing else. just keep moving through the days.