In the poem “Ordinary Objects,” Lynn Emanuel writes about broken hearts. An old story. Everywhere she looks she sees loss. Things charged with meaning not because they contain it but because sorrow places meaning in them. Pictures, flowers, insects, all reflect the pain the narrator feels. Then the surrender:
The curtains reach for you
I am full of grief. I am going
To lie down and die and be reborn
To come back as these roses
And wind myself thorn by
Thorn around your house
The familiar “I can’t go on/I must go on” of art. If you can’t have your lover, then at least you can be near them. I love that image: “thorn by thorn around your house.” Hanging on. The last thing left to us at the end when we are not the ones to end it.
The end of love. “It always ends the same” sings Kenya Grace. The song is about how the magic of infatuation leads inevitably to heartbreak: “then one random night/ when everything changes/ you won’t reply/ and we’ll go back to strangers.” All of us have been on both sides of that. You love someone; you talk about what your wedding song will be; you entertain fantasies of old age together. And one day you lay in bed next to them dreaming about never having to come back to their place. Or, the opposite, you see the growing coldness in their smile but still manage to be surprised when they tell you that it’s over.
It's either dread or grief. You want the feeling to be over. You want to lay down and die and be reborn as the person you were before it all began. You never want to go through it again. Kenya Grace says that “it’ll never change/ and it will just stay like this” but the song clearly hopes that’s not true. The ending of relationships makes you never want to start them.
I used to tell my last girlfriend that if we ever broke up, she was going to be the last person I dated. She didn’t believe me. This month it will have been five years since we broke up, and in that time I have never even thought about going on a date. But not because I remain traumatized by the end of that relationship. That relationship ended because it had to and it hurt for a long time but that passed. And it also isn’t because I’m afraid of going through the pain of another breakup. The ending isn’t what bothers me.
What I can’t go through again is the beginning. I don’t want to get to know someone or have them get to know me. I don’t want to hear my own stories anymore. I don’t want to confide in someone new. I don’t want to explain what makes me who I am or what matters to me. It’s the things that lead to the magic of infatuation that I can’t stomach.
I want to sit in silence and look at people. Even when I am alone, I feel love and connection to the people in my life—I don’t need a lover to feel complete. Romantic love is for courageous souls that want to brave beginnings and endings, and I am not one of those people anymore.
