Broken Heart Murder Mystery
a lineage and a laugh and an everything.
Whodunnit?
Who broke this perpetually broken heart?
Was Aaron P. the first? In his stupid cafeteria sailor hat as he adorably scraped lunch trays? He cheated on me with Sierra C., learning how to french kiss together the summer before seventh grade. I was mortified. Sierra mentioned it to me casually. Like I was in on the arrangement. I pretended like I was.
And this was after he had carved my initials in his hand with…I don’t actually know what with. We were sixth graders. A dull pair of scissors possibly. DDKM. But the second D looked like an O so it read like doookum.
Or was it Greg R.? He was a pothead who went to another school. Technically I stole him from one of my closest friends, which was bad karma from the beginning.
But also very romantic when he misquoted a famous movie line to see if anyone would correct him and I did.
“This looks like the beginning of great fri—”
“—isn't it beautiful friendship?” I butt in, and we locked eyes.
(Later, I found out that locking eyes was actually challenging for him since he had a genetic condition that made his eyes naturally shake left to right. Left to right.)
He never found out I’d never seen the movie the line was from. Casablanca. I just kept letting him think 14-year-old me was as artsy as he was, with his writer parents who both drove old Volvos.
We entered a passionate email love affair. Dial-up was erotic. 3%, 11%, 43% 88%, 100%—HALLELUJAH. He’d written. He loves me. He would be feeling up my overly padded bra soon.
We were as dramatic and verbose as Romeo and Juliet. Which was perfect because at the time my little sister was playing the Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes movie version soundtrack over and over. I can't actually remember how he broke my heart, just that our love was bound for a tragic bullseye. I think I forbid him to be high around me and he kept not being not high around me.
All I know is that some drama-seeking missile in me seemed almost determined to be betrayed, and so it was.
Next, we have David C. He was short and wore a t-shirt the color green I still look for everywhere. I'm wearing a tank top that is the same green now. I'd rather not get into our basement make-out sessions and how I lost my virginity there and would like to instead skip straight to the part where he cheated on me with a cheerleader named Kristi in a hot tub. I was devastated. Demolished. Imprinted with neural pathways of mistrust. Sierra C. sixth grade flashbacks.
A few years down the road, when we both were in college, I heard that he'd been drunk at some party, saying my name and lamenting that he lost the best thing that ever happened to him, so I guess I got the last laugh.
Tyler S. followed soon after David C. spurned me and dear god, did I love that boy’s smile. Teeth like chiclets but picture it as if that was a flattering thing. He told me the backs of my arms were soft even though they had these little red bumps all over them. And once, after zoning out for an alarming amount of minutes as I sat at his mother’s kitchen table, he came to and told me I had artist's hands.
I confess that the love I had for Tyler may have been the first time it was the real thing.
Beyond hand carvings.
Beyond infatuation.
Beyond lust.
It was the kind of love where I wanted him to be happy more than I wanted him for myself. So when he wanted to go have experiences with other people at college…then came back home and dated his email best friend…then left to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints…I pined harder than I ever have in my entire life (FOR YEARS). I searched the city constantly for his dark red truck even when I knew he wasn't in town. I listened to Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” and the Beatles “Something” obsessively. Wrote my first and one of very few songs I’ve ever written on the guitar about him…
and let him go.
Then dated his cousin. (!!!)
This newsletter is getting longer than I planned for and we’re not even approaching the finish line. There’s still the cousin, who I technically had a crush on even before Tyler, but who also left me for a mission. Claire, my freshman year roommate and obsession, who shared my birthday and made me laugh harder than is possible for most humans, but was still in love with her high school girlfriend…but now we are getting into spoiler territory for my book, sooooo…
Lemme try to get, somewhat indelicately, to the poorly-transitioned point:
It’s possible no one breaks our hearts but ourselves. It’s possible our soul, who is driving the whole bus, steers us to these breakings because it knows that we need this to remember who we really are and to become the living embodiment of love on this goddamn gorgeous planet, instead of always seeking that love outside of ourselves.
It’s possible we do all this living by setting our hearts up to be broken just so. To sputter and stutter and fracture in just the exquisitely exact way we need. It's possible that in the heartbreaking ordeal, no one is the bad guy except for ourselves and everyone else at various turns. It's possible that something in our genetic code and spiritual DNA waddles around, as ram dass says, looking for the shadow of love to imprint on, but not knowing how to actually metabolize and be satiated.
Of course, none of this helps in the moment of the breaking. And no one, I mean NO ONE, wants to hear it. From that place, far out at sea, tossed in the waves of our own emotions, it's impossible to see such a simple and beautiful shore.
No, in moments of heartbreak, we have to simply have to live it, letting the lessons come when they will. Believing that at any moment we may suddenly realize it's only about two inches of water we feel like we are drowning in. We can actually put our feet down any time.
I’m out at sea (or flopping around in a puddle) of the biggest heartbreak of my life to date. Nothing makes sense and I don't think it can or should.
But I always think of one of my favorite scenes from my favorite movie, The Royal Tenenbaums. Royal, played by Gene Hackman, is an old shyster who cons his whole family, whom he abandoned years ago, into believing he has cancer so that he can have a place to stay. In the process he ends up inadvertently inviting them into truth and self-revelation.
At the end of the movie (spoiler alert), Royal’s ruse is discovered and he is kicked out of the family home. He is almost gleeful as he monologues about what his ‘cancer’ and brush with death taught him about love. His youngest and most compassionate son, Richie, says,
“Dad, you were never dying.”
Royal responds,
“But I'm gonna live.”
Yeah. Maybe I was never dying in any of those heartbreaks. Maybe I’m not actually dying in this one either. Or maybe I died each time, and was reborn.
The point is,
I’m gonna live.
The point is,
I’m gonna live.
xx,
Yan
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