“Some people came into the world and never once looked up to see the lives around them – they were so focused on what they wanted, what they needed. No one else mattered to them. They disconnected from sympathy and pity and guilt. Some people came into the world as monsters. I understood that now.”
Ruby Daly from In The Afterlight by Alexandra Bracken
Mike “Goob” Yagoobian is the antagonist in the movie Meet the Robinsons. As a child he was obsessed with baseball, frequently talking about it to his roommate in the Sixth Street Orphanage, Cornelius “Lewis” Robinson, the main character. One night, before the Little League Championship, Lewis stayed up late working on an invention. Because of this, Goob didn’t get any sleep. That next morning, at the baseball game, Goob fell asleep on the field and missed the catch that would have won them the game. He was bitter and pledged the rest of his life to destroying Lewis’ destiny. That was his villain origin story.
You’re about to read about mine.
In the last chapter of Love and Loss you learned about Matthew Jameson, the boy I fell unrealistically and naively in love with. Now you’ll learn how my love was ripped away from me. How in just 24 hours I went from feeling like I had everything to nothing. How the strength of “forever” lies not in the word itself but in the people who promise it.
So, here it is. The end of my relationship. Because just as you had to fall in love with him the way I did to understand, you’ll have to fall out of love with him the way I did too.
—
From Matthew on September 24, 2021 at 3:00 am:
First off, let me start by saying that my feelings for you are not gone at all. I still love you and think you’re one of a kind, but I feel like I might want to go all in with the life that I’m starting to construct at college. As harsh and as unfair and as unlike-Matthew it might seem, I feel like a relationship might not be something I want right now. I’m finding myself jam packed with things to do and people to meet. What I realized is that, if I was going to sustain our relationship, it would mean skipping out and sacrificing opportunities here.
This was not all part of a super secret plan of mine to go to college and then break up with you; I promise. My feelings for you are not gone in any way. You didn’t do anything wrong; in fact, you’ve been about as close to a perfect girlfriend as one can get. You have been so amazing to me, and I hate so much that I feel like I have to give us up.
I know this is going against so many of the promises and things I’ve said in the past about our relationship going forward, and for that I’m so sorry. It’s not fair, and I know it hurts. I certainly am not okay with how this has to end and I know you won’t be either, but I hope we can both eventually come to terms with it. I’m trying to do what’s best for both of us.
…And just like that, nearly two years of memories dissolved to nothing, over a text.
I woke up the morning of my first exam at Vanderbilt to that message. Needless to say, I did not take the test.
Horrified that the unfathomable had become a reality, I burst out of my room in a panic. My fight or flight response had been activated. Wide-eyed and breathless I ran outside into the late September cold. The first thing I did was call my mom, and at the drop of a hat, she left work and started the five hour drive to come comfort me. My mom is the best.
When she arrived, we went to her hotel room where I faced the hungriest kind of pain: Grief.
“What’s a greater feeling than love? Loss.”
Rue and Elliot from Euphoria
Do you remember D.A.R.E from when we were kids? It stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education, and despite how annoying those people who sit outside Walgreens and ask you for D.A.R.E donations are, it’s actually pretty important. See, addictive drugs manipulate the release of a chemical called dopamine at a part of your brain called the nucleus accumbens. Dopamine is, simply put, the “feel good” chemical, and taking drugs can lead to 2-10 times more dopamine being released. According to behavioral psychologist, B.F. Skinner, and his theory of Operant Conditioning, behaviors that are rewarded are more likely to occur again. Taking drugs is rewarded by enormous amounts of dopamine, creating a pattern of consumption and aggressive addictions.
Addiction is dangerous. Those with an addiction will stop at no end to get their drug of choice, sacrificing money, friends, or family. The need for a drug is so intense they’d sell their soul. But while D.A.R.E warned us off of drugs like cocaine and meth, no one warned us off of love.
Loving and being loved by Matthew flooded my brain with dopamine. He was my own personal dose of heroin. The picture below is from that day in the hotel. That day when I went through the vicious stages of withdrawal. I sobbed so hard I thought my body would explode and then I slept from utter exhaustion.
Symptoms of withdrawal include depression, severe anxiety, and feeling detached from the self. I felt them all for months. I had to beg my legs to roll out of bed in the morning and plead with my hands to pull on clean clothes. I had to force myself to eat when I couldn’t stomach the idea of food. I had to fake a smile and continue to be social so I wouldn’t lose any friends. I had to go to class, do homework, and take tests like I wasn’t dying inside. It was simply exhausting to live.
I learned just how powerful loss is. Where love coats life with a shimmering gloss, loss is total blackness. It’s debilitating. There is nothing else other than pain. You only have so much to give as you navigate it and you don’t really have any power to change it. It’s silencing. When you feel loss you’re expected to keep going. To keep walking with your head held high and your lips sealed shut. But when you’re in love you can express every feeling without disapproval, guilt, or shame. I wore my love like a cape so that the world would know that he gave me wings. And then I tried to bury my loss like it had died along with my love.
“When you look at someone through rose colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags.”
Wanda Pierce from Bojack Horseman
When we’re in love, we have a tendency to overlook the bad things. I am as much victim to this as anyone else. In Part 1 of Love and Loss I didn’t include any of the bad parts of our relationship. You had to fall in love with him the way I did, remember? So I left you in oblivion. But after Matthew and I broke up I put every mistake he made on replay.
There was, of course, that time he told me that he wouldn’t be fully comfortable with me taking medication for my mental health because “it wouldn’t really be me”. I also didn’t mention how he broke up with me for 24 hours, just two days before my 18th birthday on our eight month anniversary. Just wait. It gets worse. After he told me he wanted me to transfer to go to college with him, he told me that I loved him more than he loved me…and then proceeded to tell me that again on two other occasions. Matthew never complimented me, dreaded buying me gifts, and barely consoled me as I went through tough times. He would cancel our planned hangouts when a more enticing option came around. A couple weeks after we broke up, he asked if we could talk, and then ghosted me the day of our call. The last time we spoke he was playing games on his phone while I cried.
In the absence of loving him with all my heart, I hated him. Being a good person was at the core of his identity, so I dreamt of the day he’d come to Vanderbilt and I’d get a chance to stab him in his moral wounds. To rub every mistake in his face until he hurt like I did.
I honestly couldn’t tell you where my sadness ended and my spite began. They bled together like calligraphy ink. So just like Goob built Lewis up to be a villian in his story, I turned Matthew into mine.
“I make no apologies for how I chose to repair what you broke.”
Meredith Grey from Grey’s Anatomy
My first mistake after reading that initial text was contacting his friends. Eventually, I told them Matthew had broken up with me, just for the satisfaction of hearing them say that he sucked even if they didn’t mean it. Though it was wrong to want to spread a narrative of his evilness, I told myself it was my right. He broke my heart. He broke his promises. He ended our nearly two year relationship over text at three in the morning WHILE I WAS ASLEEP. I deserved to tell whoever I wanted. I deserved to say whatever I wanted. I deserved to be angry.
Three weeks after we broke up I sent him a message, and, well, I’ll just let you read it for yourself:
Don’t act like you did this for me. Own what you wanted and what you did. You didn’t want me anymore so you ended our relationship so you could build new ones. You chose for it to be easy, to never have to make sacrifices, to never have to feel longing, and you’re entitled to that. That doesn’t make you a bad person, Matthew. It makes you weak.
I called him a fraud, a liar, and an asshole. I told him that I didn’t recognize the person he had become. I mocked his pain, trashed his character, and threw my fake happiness in his face. If our relationship was a bridge, he was the years of rain that rusted the beams. He was the overbearing weight of cars that led to the first crack. He was the architect with new plans. But I was the wrecking ball.
Texting him wasn’t enough though. The only thing that made me sicker than the idea of never loving him again was the idea of him loving someone else, so I had to beat him to it. I had to be first. And I was. Two weeks before winter break I went out with a guy. Within four days I was sleeping over in his room and wearing his sweatshirt to class. Andrew (pseudonym) made me forget about Matthew. I’m sure I merely filled a space for him too. We were two starved people eating up the attention.
Andrew and I stopped talking soon after arriving home for break. In the absence of something to do, I decided to roadtrip by myself 12 and half hours back to Michigan to “visit my friends”. Why should I have to give up my old home because Matthew lives there too? I had every right to go back. It was as much mine as it was his.
While I never saw him, I made sure I was everywhere in his world. I made plans with all his friends and all of mine. I drove down the streets of our little town hoping he’d see my car driving by. I told his friends planted pieces of information in the hope that they would relay it back to him and it would make him sad. Information like Andrew. I wanted to take up as much space in his life as I could. And I did. But it was never enough.
I sobbed heavily as I drove back to Arkansas. Throttled by Covid and heartbreak, I felt like even the most minor gust of wind could blow me away.
As the weeks went by, I continued to villainize him in the public eye. I posted a video on my Snapchat story of my friends stomping on all the clothes he had given me. I described the details of my newfound commitment issues and depressive weight loss and blamed it all on him. And I made fun of him with every chance I got in the name of “healing.” It was never enough.
“If it was a game of chess you’d be the greatest queen to have by your side, but the worst enemy queen to face too.”
Dillion Cato (pseudonym)
The world told me I had the right to be mad and to express it. I mean, just look at Olivia Rodrigo, one of the most popular young women right now. She won three Grammys for writing an album of diss tracks about the tall brown haired boy that broke her heart. Where was my compensation? Every other piece of media in my life validated my behavior. In Season 3 Episode 6 of Gilmore Girls, Rory is angry with Jess for being with another girl. So, inspired by her rage and jealousy she eggs his car. Damon Salvatore from The Vampire Diaries became a murderous psychopath after his ex-girlfriend, Katherine Pierce, chose his brother over him. In the movie, To All The Boys I’ve Loved, Peter dates Lara Jean to spite his ex. Revenge is broadcasted across the media in big bold letters.
But at the end of the day, it came down to this: No compensation would ever make losing Matthew hurt less. And in the process of trying to tear him down I tore myself down with him. Previously, as I navigated the ups and downs of life, I held onto one piece of reassurance. I was a good person. But now I woke up with nothing in my heart but hate. Hate for Matthew and hate for myself.
When I wrote down the quote at the beginning of this chapter in my diary it was two months after my break up with Matthew and it was him who I believed to be the monster. It took roughly seven months, but then I knew that the real monster was me.
“I open at the close.”
The golden snitch in Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling
Oddly enough, heartbreak taught me more about love than being in a relationship. I learned that there are different versions of it. Young and old. Conditional and unconditional. Good and bad. I think sometimes we need loss in order to learn good love. We need to be able to recognize the things we want and the mistakes we made. And it is no secret that I made mistakes in love and while falling out of it. It was Matthew’s fault that we didn’t talk when that was happening, but it is my fault that we will never talk again. Eventually I learned that the biggest test of my love was what I would do when I lost it. And I failed. I might have loved him more, but he loved me better.
I saw on TikTok somewhere that hate is not the opposite of love, indifference is, because in a lot of ways, love and hate are the same. Both are powerful emotions which inspire our thoughts and actions, and so it’s better to think of them as different sides of the same spectrum. Hate is a type of love, one that burns just as bright but causes the destruction of everything else in its path. I get how painful losing someone is, but turning to hate is what causes real loss.
So fall. Fall so hard you have to struggle to get back up. Love recklessly, deeply, and unconditionally. Love with all of your heart, but know that the only thing that can stand to take more away from you during heartbreak is yourself. In times of loss don’t stray towards hate. Stray towards love. It’s the only thing that can help you rebuild.