I hate a sunny day when my heart is broken. It reminds me the cataclysm is contained, an apartment fire limited to the confines of my hollowed out chest. The smoke is choking only me, the world draining of color for no one else. A sparrow lifts a twig from the ground, lifts by instinct to some waiting branch. I try to collect my courage for a walk to the car.
Heartbreak reaches every corner of my being. Is it like this for everyone? Each time it’s happened, I wrestle with my inner optimist, eager to hurry the grief along, put on a good show, return to the bigger story. Then heartbreak stains everything he touches, bleeds out in every poem.
The best chapters of my life have always followed some startling spill to the pavement. In 2016, roaring in grief in my empty bedroom, hands in cups overflowing against my shaking head. In 2020, shaking shoulders as I called my sister, stammering to tell her I’d just lost my job over a Zoom call. In 2022, waking up to a broken promise, punching my chest in the mirror, whispering stupid fucking boy.
In one such moment of grief, a friend told me I’d soon be showing everyone what it was to bloom through pain.
And so it is – I know how to cut away the dead, till the soil beneath me, find new sun. But I am tired of blooming through the wounds in my story. I am ready for something sturdy, something steady. I am eager to flourish in a chapter that holds no desire to break me.
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Time is a ribbon. It’s an idea I believe to be borrowed from A Wrinkle in Time. Stretched out, it looks like a line, but some events are like fingertips pinching two ends together. You grab coffee with somebody you knew years ago, and suddenly you exist in both timelines at once. Old rhythms, shaking dust off memories, feelings a song you’d forgotten but not washing over you. Before long, the ribbon stretches itself back out, and there you are, both abruptly remembering the distance, a gut-punch as time’s tension resumes. You are not those people anymore.
Our stories are, perhaps, a circle, and we travel them with the idea we can stop the repetitions. But, try as we may, we can’t help but repeat a few patterns, stubborn in our learning and flimsy in our unlearning. The third time, the fifth time we hit the same brick wall, we lament that perhaps we haven’t grown the way we’d imagined. Then we find a new way through, a more clever way across, and we discover there is richness in revisiting.
In 2023, I can reach back to the person navigating a shattered world in 2016, and I can whisper to him, You were right about who you are. He won’t hear it, but perhaps I’m not whispering it on his behalf. Perhaps I’m more sure than ever of the only company I’ll ever be guaranteed – my own.
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There is no loneliness greater than betraying yourself to maintain the company of somebody else. This I know from experience.
I’ve spent the better part of the past year in a kind of relationship therapy with myself. Why am I so willing to make concessions for what I need so I can provide what someone else wants? In July, my therapist told me she believed we’d reached the end of our sessions together. “I’m really proud of how far you’ve come,” she told me, “and I’m just not sure there’s anything I’m helping you through anymore.”
Boundaries. Gentleness for myself, first and foremost. “What would happen if you stopped trying to show boys how great they could be? What would happen if you wait for a boy who showed you how great he could be?” Questions that rocked my world. Firm reminders away from putting my story in the same circles. “Try a new way. Choose again.”
It’s a Friday evening, and the sun just poked through the clouds. It feels good to savor it, to feel like a member of the world around me, alongside the sparrow, the crowd of people and their complexities, the car rolling by playing Amor Prohibido at full volume.
Inhale. Exhale. Big drinks of breath. Here I am.
michael king 