Write About Heartbreak

a decade of grief & my best friend

In a writing class, you’re asked to write about your greatest heartbreak. You flip through the thin tissue paper that separates each day from the last. Some days are different than others, some dripping thick with honey and light and some that feel like touching your palm to a hot stove. You sort the days into three piles: wild desperation, exhausted resignation, ragged acceptance.

You stay up too late trying to render it all perfectly: the thrill of making her laugh even though it was always so easy, the shift of the mattress when she’d crawl into your bed after sneaking out of her own house and getting into good, honest trouble: vodka on her breath and stories to tell in the morning. And there were her ever shifting moods, unfettered bliss swinging to raging despair, crackling anger swinging to ebullient joy.

You’re tired but you like what you’ve written. Mostly because you believe it. Articulating pain is when you’re the most convincing. It takes a lot for you to believe yourself about most feelings. You can talk yourself out of happiness very quickly, but your wounds are unquestionable. One of your first thoughts when the police came to your door and told you that your best friend had ended her life was, “She tied a noose without knowing how?” 

For years I was stuck on this detail, not knowing which reality could be worse: that she’d googled it or that she worked in a wild state of desperate instinct.  I loved her deeply and I still talk to her. Mostly outside, late at night, under summer stars. Usually through quiet, heavy tears, no longer angry sobs. I speak to her humbly, tell her she isn’t forgotten. I offer myself up to her, my love and pain and everything in between. I stand in the quiet and I summon the strongest sense memories of her I can: the sound of her voice singing along to the radio while driving too fast on back country roads, the weight of her head asleep in my lap on the way home from a party, the ferocity with which she’d protect me from anyone who wished me harm. And her laughing, always laughing, laughing at everything and nothing at all. 

I forgave her a long time ago, I only hope she can forgive me. I wish I could’ve held her hand more, had another chance to braid her freshly shampooed hair while we watched a movie. I wish I could’ve gone to her window that night and screamed, “I love you! I love you so fucking much! Please don’t fucking leave me!” I would’ve screamed until my voice was shredded and every neighbor turned their lights on. I would’ve screamed until someone called the cops on me for disturbing the peace. I would’ve screamed, “You’re in so much pain but let me take some! Please give it to me! I’ll carry it for you! I’ll carry it for you for as long as I have to!” 

But that’s not what happened. She died alone in a bathroom while all of the suburbanites in her neighborhood slept soundly. She died while, across town, I probably tossed and turned over something else entirely. 

I’m not so naive as to think I could’ve changed it, changed her, changed how it all played out like a movie that I was forced to keep watching, a scene I was cast in against my will. I could keep haunting myself with speculations about her last moments and the things I never said, with the selfish “what-ifs,” with those dismal “if only’s” but I’d be ignoring the important part.

The intimacy and the intensity of love between teenage girls is all consuming, all powerful. It’s the thrill of telling a secret alongside the comfort of secrets being kept. You don’t love like that again. You couldn’t, even if you wanted to. You’ll never be that raw again. You’ll never be able to be so beautifully clumsy with your one and only heart. After all of these years, it’s the only detail that matters out of this catastrophe. It sits deep in my chest and reverberates with each breath,

“You loved each other, 

you loved each other, 

you loved each other.” 

That’s all there is.

That’s all we need to hold onto.

One day I won’t be able to summon the memory of the sound of her snoring. The t-shirt of hers I kept lost her scent years ago. But that’s okay. Time will march forward, but she will always be seventeen, and in some ways, I will be too.  

It’s not until four people in class have shared their stories that you realize everyone else interpreted this prompt as romantic heartbreak. You can’t relate. No boyfriend has leveled you, not enough to write about. Not even that you can really remember. You swiftly alter the pronouns, changing all of the her to him, editing some little details.

Suddenly it’s the stuff of Greek tragedy, 

It’s Titanic. It’s Romeo, it’s Juliet. 

But wasn’t it always?