The Creative Non-fiction Corner//

Genesis: The breakup is going fine, thanks for asking

The day after it ended, I mapped the day like I’d called in sick to our relationship. In the morning, I thought of the long espresso shots I’d pull for us to pour over ice. And in the evening, how we’d watch a terrible reality TV show, pressed together on the couch, a sweaty bowl of potato chips on the table between us.

The hours between were spent shoveling sour gummy worms into my mouth by the fistful, gnawing furiously, and shadowboxing the bathroom mirror, rimmed with grime and dried-up toothpaste.

I wanted desperately to fall into myself like girls in romantic comedies are allowed to, let my hair grow greasy and spoon Ben and Jerry’s into my mouth, openly sob to Norah Jones in the living room. But, most real life women don’t have the time to fall apart completely and cinematically.

I lit candles. I went to work. I counted steps. I stopped smoking weed. I bought a cardigan and a hair clip. It felt a bit like holding a vigil, it looked like the scorched clean remnants of every day that came before. I felt like my own patient, caring for myself with the drone-like enthusiasm of a soap opera nurse.

Aloud before bed, I’d say to myself, “It’s going to be fine, it happens every day.” Then less to myself and out into the room, “It’s going to be fine, I love you.”

When I was in first year and freshly 18, I’d prepared myself for an experience not dissimilar to those illustrated in The Sex Lives of College Girls. I’d imagined long nights in strangers' bedrooms with unfamiliar flannel sheets and the metallic taste of old liquor at the back of my throat.

Instead, my ex and I rekindled our relationship. And in their arms, I’d found solace, wondering why I’d wanted those things to begin with, or if I just liked the idea of being someone who wanted things that scratched and bit and burned.

At the time, I’d called it my residual desire to be the cool girl, the same way I’d order a beer before tossing it into the nearest trash can, spending an extra four dollars instead of just ordering that sugary cocktail. It’s a hard habit to kick, harder still when being single is an experience that, in media, is defined by one's ability to live in solitude.

I’d always imagined my mind as a sharp place, full of spikes and scrap metal — my relationship had given me a soft place to land. Often, I wondered if I liked myself more around them, or if I liked the version of myself I imagined them imagining me to be.

We spent three years together, squeezing and inspecting each other's lived experiences like we were very bad but very curious surgeons operating on a body. It was exhausting, exhilarating and deeply intimate.

While I lay in their arms, I felt a deep peace, knowing that if this fantastic person loved me, I must be something worth loving. For a moment, the Greek chorus of catholic shame that permeated my day-to-day thoughts would cease. And I would sleep.

Sometimes though, it just doesn’t work out. I was thrust back into the breathing, beating world without the warm cocoon of the romantic love I’d been bubble-wrapped in my entire adult life. Suddenly, I was exposed. I felt like a nerve. The dating world, which I had once fantasized about entering, felt daunting and far too big.

I will take an aside here to say that the lesbian dating scene in Vancouver is next-level incestuous. My brief time on Tinder was spent, for the most part, screenshotting my friends' profiles to send to them mockingly and matching with people in my classes before promptly throwing my phone across the room. Everyone knows your ex, everyone owns at least two more beanies than you’d like them to and they all go to the same climbing gym. The pickier you become, the more you will look within and see that you are not such a prize either, being a mostly clean creative writing major, occasionally employed and often pretentious. You are stuck between a rock and a hard place. And rest assured, most lesbians are eager to climb that rock and then go hang out with their ex afterward, probably your ex too, while they’re at it.

It wasn’t the dating world that concerned me so much as the single world. I cried, more than once, thinking about how nobody cared if I ate breakfast, or resoled my thrift store boots. I had never before had to celebrate my small accomplishments alone — I’d hardly ever killed my own spiders.

Given this was my last year of university, I’d accrued a long to-do list, having anticipated having one major part of my life being squared away. Grad school applications were around the corner and I was looking at everyone’s shoes on the bus, imagining seeing them bent upside down to dry over an air vent, crying into my sleeve because the intimacy of imagining it was the closest I’d felt to another person in weeks. Needless to say, applications were going swimmingly.

Of course, it hurts. This morning I made eggs with a runny centre and talked to my best friend on the phone. And I started listening to Joni Mitchell. And there are parts of me that I hate, but they’re mine still.

Isn’t it horrible? To belong to yourself.

And I cried until I threw up last weekend. I drank a French 75 and played beer pong. I talked myself to sleep and took myself on long wet walks around the park near my house. I tried to trap a mouse in a pot. I started an application and promptly deleted it. I texted my ex twice. I got rejected from two magazines and nobody saw. I bought new jeans and nobody saw. I bore witness, I confessed and repented. I walked home alone.

Isn’t it something? To belong to yourself.

This piece was published under The Ubyssey's Creative Non-Fiction Corner. Want to submit a personal essay, short story or poem? Subscribe to our features newsletter for monthly writing prompts under this column.