Frame of reference
Endings can teach us even more than beginnings.
I’ve been through five significant breakups in my adult life.
The first breakup happened while we were living on different continents. It was my first big love, and although we were both bisexual it was very much a hetero relationship. (Although, he once told me that he loved that I “looked like a dyke.” This was a massive compliment.) The breakup, just like the relationship was intense, emotional, panoptic. It swallowed me up and spit me out several weeks later in the bathroom of a club in Cape Town where I made out with a cute girl whose name I never got.
The second breakup happened several years and two cross-country moves later. I remember the moment I fell in love, listening to her sweet, melodic voice on a song she had written and recorded. We were both mentally unwell and immobilized by the depth of our darkness. Neither of us could pull the other out, and I dreaded coming home every day. She thought proposing would solve our issues, and I broke up with her before she had a chance to follow through.
The third breakup was a slow, painful letting go over many conversations. We had known each other for many years, and she asked me out after a debate watch party at my house. We spent the next year laughing and napping and fucking. It was my first time experiencing secure attachment, the symmetry of independence and absolute obsession with each other. In the end, we lost both our relationship and our friendship.
The fourth breakup came in the early days of the pandemic. Our love was sweet, light, playful. Finite. We had reached the outer limits of our dynamic, the edge beyond which was nothing. When it ended, we cried for hours in her bed, and she asked me to help her assemble a dresser before I left. I did. During our post-break-up check-in, she gave me a diorama of a woman wrapped in a cocoon, the moment before emerging.
The fifth breakup is the most recent, still raw. We quickly learned the grooves of each other’s brains. We developed a shared language, shared culture, shared glances and noises, the smallest units of conversation, fully understood. One day, I gave her a copy of The Left Hand of Darkness with an inscription that read, “You can have it all, my empire of dirt.” I fell in love quickly, deeply. But it wasn’t enough to overcome the chasm between us.
In my 20’s, breakups felt cathartic—one step closer to knowing myself, one step closer to building the life I want. It was the inevitable path toward the future, toward growth.
In my 30’s, breakups feel like a personal failure—one step closer to dying alone, one step closer to running “out of time.”
But endings can teach us even more than beginnings. Why not celebrate them?
I knew a couple who threw a “de-coupling” ceremony in place of a wedding when they mutually decided to end their ten-year relationship. It was an honoring of their decade together, and a celebration of the future, separately for both of them. The registry included things they would each need for their new lives after splitting (“after living together so long, we only have one of everything!”).
I don’t know how to end this, but here I am trying to be a Writer so I’ll share a poem I wrote after a difficult breakup (your guess which one!) that stretched me in ways I could only process with the aid of poetry.
Frame of Reference
we’re up against an impossible equation,
you and me.
and you know, grief and love aren’t as distant cousins as they’d have you believe. a caution worth forgetting.
you tell me we make things bigger than they are. you seem to have some perspective,
in spite of being human. i believe you.
the waves come in, slowly, surely, on time, as always. uninterested in our inconceivables,
they laugh.
at us, with us, depends who you ask.
you’ve conjured me, i know, in the crevice between your perfectly shaped collarbone and years-old bruises taking too damn long time to heal,
you’ve willed me into existence. then the world got in the way. isn’t that what happened?
the sun scoffs at our impatience, you know how she is. she would swallow us whole,
if only she cared to.
(she doesn’t care to)
i’ve summoned you to knock down my walls, bricks meticulously laid. you tell me you’re strong. i want to believe you. come in, don’t dare.
me and you, we don’t add up, we conclude.
as we grieve, the stars dance circles around us. they act like teenagers, but they seem to be wise. in spite of being dead.
if only we had a billion years to listen to what they had to say.
one day i hope to be intact again.
just not today.
Love love love