Adjusts Itself to Midnight

On this dripping morning when you must still be asleep,
when I don't tell you I love you or wait for you to come back,
when I don't go to see you and in silence make my peace—
the wind and the rain will cover my tracks.

I have sought comfort in embarrassing corners of the internet. I created a Reddit account. I read articles on exboyfriendrecovery.com. I am reading an article about ghosting on verywell.com:

Ghosting is a form of silent treatment, which mental health professionals have described as emotional cruelty. You feel powerless and silenced. You don't know how to make sense of the experience or have an opportunity to express your feelings.

I want to tell her how cruel she has been while also acknowledging that she is in pain. I want to express my anger but I don't want to give up and push her away. That's the last chance that I hold on to.

What is it about the day as a unit of heartbreak? Yesterday, being the one-month marker, was so hard. I woke up sad and I went to bed sad. But today——the same kind of struggle isn't there. It's not that I haven't been sad, or haven't been thinking about her a lot. But I picked up my phone without hoping there would be a message from her. When has that happened? Is this the first time? Probably not, but the first time I noticed.

Symptoms of Heartbreak

• circular thought
• sleeplessness
• picking at fingers
• tired
• sadness is a home base I return to after flights of happiness and connection

Today I pulled the 8 of Cups, the card of letting go. I'm still amused at my blue balls joke, especially since I recognize that today is the first time since she last talked to me that I have been able to make light of the situation and poke fun at myself.

I also remember the good things. When we sat on the bench in the nature preserve it was a perfect day, not too hot, no bugs. We kissed and I asked her if it was OK if I told her I was in love with her. We were so close our lips brushed when she nodded yes. She knew far longer than me that we were in love, but I said it first. I was not asking for permission to tell her, but wondering if it was going to scare her off for me to say so. I look back on my own willingness to take the risk. Maybe it astonished both of us.

Tomorrow is one full month November 8th - December 8th.

Dream House

As long as I can remember having dreams, spaces—especially interior spaces—have been central to them. Some spaces exist only in my dreams but I return to them over and over. Sometimes my dreams take a real place and render it with great accuracy; other times quite loosely. I do have recurring dreams of outdoor landscapes and sometimes institutional buildings. One of my earliest dreams was wandering around a white institutional building with amorphous walls and ceilings and irregular blobs of stained glass for windows, looking for my mother. But most often the spaces in my dreams are houses.

The first house where I remember finding dream rooms was my aunt's house next door to where I grew up. It was a strange house even in waking life: a kitchen table that folded up into the wall like a Meyer bed, a bedroom that could only be accessed through another bedroom, a tiny triangular sink and—do I remember correctly?—a toilet on the landing at the top of the basement stairs. The basement had soft, sloping walls of dirt but all the rooms had built-in benches and desks and shelves. The plumbing was questionable (see the basement stairs), and a crudely realized American flag was painted on the ceiling of one of the rooms. It was as if that house was inhabited by a series of carpenters, plumbers, and handymen who had fewer skills and poorer tastes as time went on.

So it makes sense that as a small child, maybe only 4 or 5, I dreamed I had found an extra room in this house. There was a door in an exterior wall that I had never seen before. It opened into a new room that also had windows, so it was next to the house's exterior, but somehow didn't block the windows in the room I had just left. I don't remember much about the room itself except the gray Saturday afternoon light and the image of a figure—myself—standing in it.

I have dreamed rooms into many places, some real, some not. I usually start with a house I know—my old babysitter's or grandmother's or my own—and open a door which then leads into a room with another door to open, then another. I find staircases and extra floors and astonishment that I never knew any of this was here. Most are pleasant explorations. However, when I am dreaming of a house I don't know, it's often less pleasant. I find myself in a stranger's house, winding the labyrinth of rooms, turning on a light in each one as I go. I was never meant to be here and when I hear the inhabitants arrive unexpectedly, I realize that I have left a trail of lights that will lead them to me. I must somehow escape without them ever knowing I was there.

Your face is the dream—it gets less focused and more amorphous every day. I enter by way of your words and actions. We told each other many things in a short span of time, and in my head I started framing and furnishing some rooms I thought I knew. But you left suddenly and I, in the half-built house, began to do what I have always done: open doors into new rooms that lead to more rooms and hallways and staircases, basements, corners, and attics. I see the light coming in from the windows but never look outside.

I have built a dream house of your intentions and motivations. I have taken brief looks you gave me and extrapolated them into long corridors. It's easy to take for reality that astonishment when I turn a knob and it opens into a place I have never seen before. Dream house building can go on forever. But how do I get out of the house without you ever knowing I was there?

This afternoon I walked around downtown with flowers in my hand for A. I felt romantic, like I had my heart exposed. I wanted two bodies, one that could go to the shop and get A his birthday present, and another that could walk down to the restaurant where she works in the lunch rush while she has her hands full and give them to her. Stop her heart for a moment, quiet the whole restaurant in her ears. Just to look her in the eyes so she can know I still love her. I want to make that big gesture, but I don't want to violate her peace. Thinking these things in the lunch hour traffic made me feel crazy, but wanting to have two bodies means I have two hearts and two minds.

You were telling me about your day, once. You had gone to hang out with a person who was trying to make friends with you. They said, suspecting that the two of you might have a diagnosis or two in common, “Hey, do you ever get in a relationship with someone and things are going really good so you decide to burn it all down?” You knew that feeling, you said. You used to burn down relationships when you were young. But in recounting this conversation, you turned to look at me. “Never with you,” you said, “Never with you.” My mistake was that I thought I knew what you meant—that when you said to me “I'll never burn down our relationship,” not only were you sincere, but you had the capacity to carry that intention through. I choose to believe the former but was bitterly tricked by the latter.

My aunt's house, the real place out of which I made my dream rooms, burned down a few years ago. I grew up next to it until I was twelve and my bedroom window was the only one on the second floor that faced it across the alley. My family had moved away about 20 years before it caught fire, and my aunt had moved away not long after us. The people living there had been storing propane tanks—or something equally stupid—inside the attached garage and they exploded one afternoon. One of the volunteer firefighters who responded to the call was my cousin, who had grown up in that house. My mom later asked him if it was hard to see his childhood home burn. He said, “At least I knew the floor plan, so we knew how to get in and start carrying out as much as we could.” The house itself couldn't be saved; it's just an empty lot now with a sidewalk leading to nowhere. The house where I grew up survived, but the vinyl siding melted from the heat. I am imagining standing in my childhood bedroom as that dream house burns, looking out of the window and flames filling up every inch of the frame.

December 15th

The zine is a square-ish shape and won't fit into a pre-made envelope easily. I wrapped it in wax paper and cut two pieces of cardboard from an Amazon box and put it between them to keep it from bending. Then I wrapped it in heavy kraft paper and wrapped that in another layer of kraft paper. I wrote down her address—which I got on a humiliating day when I drove by her apartment building out of desperation—on a piece of paper and taped it on. No card.

Maybe it won't make it to her. Maybe she will open it expecting it to be a gift and be disappointed. Maybe she will be sad that I finally rejected her. Maybe she will be relieved to know that she successfully burned it down. I don't know, but I know that telling her I love her one more time will not make a difference. If it did, she would be here now.

If she returns to sender, I guess I'll remove the tape and wax paper and put the whole thing in the recycling bin. I have not stopped loving her, but I have stopped expecting there will be a future.

Expect: ex + spectare “thoroughly” + “to look” Expecting is waiting, and I will not wait any more.

Maybe I will keep pretending, or hoping, but those are part of my process and don't depend on her. I will not give her an explanation or leave the door open. And one day, long after that piece of mail reaches wherever it's going to go, I'll stop hoping that she is every phone call and that every car that pulls up to the house is hers.

The weeks after my breakup with X were like descending into Tartarus covered in ashes. I could not anticipate how much I would need the stories of others to keep me oriented and moving back out toward the daylight once again. I'd previously thought that breakup novels, albums, poems, and songs are overrepresented in the world, but now I see that the search for healing comes from finding a breakup story that is just like our story. That is why they proliferate through every form of media. We wander through the world with the story of our pain wrapped in our arms hoping to find one that matches it. And so I offer this one, not only in the service of my own healing, but hopefully in service of others.

X and I met by chance at an event where we were both working in positions of service for different employers. We did not know it until we compared notes weeks later, but we both had a profoundly disorienting experience conventionally called “love at first sight.” That phrase doesn't really capture the confusing feeling that you've been reunited with someone you've never met—that the only reason why you can be so drawn to their face, their body, their voice, their words is because you somehow knew them even though you know you've never known them.

X is a lifelong lesbian; I have known for many years that I am bisexual, but my attraction to women had mostly been sexual up until that point. I had never fallen in love with one. The moment we met, she and I almost instantly began disclosing to one another information about our sexuality, our relationship status (both non-monogamous), our tastes, and our ethics. She made a corny joke that I cutely did not understand. She asked for my sun sign (we're the same.) The next day, I asked for her number via a personals ad dating app, she found the ad by chance, and we began.

That was all in mid-summer. The relationship was both courtly and passionate. We marveled at how deeply we had fallen in love in such a short amount of time. She was also honest with me about her long history of tumultuous relationships, family abuse, and her patterns of pushing other people away. Specifically, she told me she had a fearful-avoidant (also known as anxious-avoidant) attachment style, which is when a person desperately wants love and closeness but easily gets overwhelmed and retreats, attacks, or disappears, often with little notice. People develop fearful-avoidant attachment style as young children when their primary caregiver is abusive, inconsistent in giving care, behaves erratically, or expects emotional support from the child. They develop survival strategies to help them cope with a caregiver who is at once a source of love and fear yet can never be depended upon for either. These strategies that make sense for small children but become maladaptive when carried into adult relationships. Given everything X had told me about her mother and her upbringing, it made perfect sense. I took all of this information in. I did not ignore it, but I hoped that X's self-awareness about her patterns meant they would be workable. They were not.

In early November, overwhelmed by work, her degree program, her best friend's substance abuse, and—I later found out—crushing depression, she sent a text asking for some space and disappeared. The writings here were made between roughly early November 2022 and mid-February 2023. I made two small handmade books (the contents of both are reproduced here) within the first few days of the breach and then started working on a larger project I eventually titled “Adjusts Itself to Midnight” after a line in the Emily Dickinson poem. Because I am a hobbyist bookbinder, binding books of my grief was my first instinct.

I started to write my thoughts down as they would come to me on quarter-size sheets of paper folded into signatures. I did not date most writings even though an obsession with the passage of time is evident in them. My original intention had been to roughly draft everything first and then edit and write it again in fair hand before binding it into the final book. I eventually decided to gather the first unedited rough writings in no specific order and bind them, creating a sort of scrap book of the relationship and a raw, disoriented transcript of grief.

In that book, I interspersed my writings with some of her text messages, which I have not reproduced here. I also sewed in a card she gave me and some other pieces of paraphernalia, including the card that I wrote but did not send her. I also included consoling quotations from novels, self-help books, songs, and poems that helped me through my grief. I then carefully sewed all these together using a criss-cross binding instead of glue so that if the pages need to be cut out again, they can. I covered the book in a midnight-blue Japanese Chiyogami paper and navy blue book cloth, bound by blue thread, with blue and black Bugra paper glued or sewn in as accents.

The book is its own object, different from this. After I transcribed the contents into a computer nearly a year later, I began to edit, fiddle, move things around and change details for either privacy or clarity. I am the only person who can fully understand the physical book I made, but I hope that this book is one others can understand.

I was later surprised to hear from X again—or rather, hear of her again—months after I finished binding the book. I was hosting an event with an author at my workplace. As I was escorting him into the event space, he said, “Our server at dinner mentioned you.” I was confused, but he clarified: “We were eating at [restaurant] and I mentioned to our server that I was doing an event at the [my workplace] and she said, 'You must know my friend Emily, then.'” It took a second for me to realize that he was talking about X, and that she was talking about me. After I escorted him to the event space and went back into the staff area, I began to cry immediately. This happened about 7 months after I had last heard from her.

The coincidence seemed miraculous. I work on a team of people who book and host dozens of events each month, and I happened to be the one who booked and hosted this author and he happened to have dinner at [restaurant] and mention this to his waiter, who happened to be X, and he also happened to relay this interaction to me in the elevator to make small talk. To complement the coincidence, only a couple of weeks earlier I had discovered that her number had been hidden in an app on my phone even though I thought I had deleted it entirely.

So I texted her and to my surprise, she responded. We met in a garden and she told me what had happened: that she had withdrawn into a dark hole of depression over the winter and had pushed everyone away from her, not just me. She assumed I was angry with her and would never want to see her again, which is why she never contacted me. She apologized for leaving me to wonder, as I had done nothing to make her leave.

Neither of us made a motion to get back together romantically, which is for the best. I do not think we should, at least in the foreseeable future. Perhaps in the unforeseeable future, but that is as yet unforeseeable.

Becoming Real

During the time that I was in the thickest of the grief, I came across The Velveteen Rabbit by chance. It's a story I've long been familiar with, since I had a picture book version of it when I was a child. A boy plays with his toy rabbit, whom he makes “real” through love. When the boy contracts scarlet fever, the doctor orders everything he had touched to be burned, including his rabbit. At the last minute, the rabbit is saved from the fire by a fairy who transforms him into a real rabbit and takes him to live among other rabbits in the forest.

At the end of my picture book version, the boy is standing in a field some time after he has recovered and a rabbit stands on its hind legs, regarding him from a distance. The page is wordless, but it is implied that this is his former stuffed rabbit and they vaguely recognize each other. I was surprised, however, in re-reading the original text of the book that no such scene happens. In fact, after the toy rabbit is taken away, the boy doesn't even care. He is distracted, instead, by his excitement at being told he is leaving for a seaside trip the next day to convalesce. The adults have also tucked a new, replacement rabbit under his arm to aid in his forgetting.

I had missed the real message of The Velveteen Rabbit until this breakup: it's not simply that love makes us real, but love—having loved—is its own reward. We make ourselves real through love, even when it is not reciprocated, even when the vicissitudes of life carry us away from one another. It was irrelevant whether or not I would see X again because I had been made real by loving her. Just as life brought us together through chance, it was bound to break us apart through happenstance. My book, then, is a transcript of the process of learning the old lesson: to have loved even once, even briefly, is enough to carry with us. Enough to carry us.