Blue Dress Hot Mess

I wrote about Marrakesh. I had meant to publish it. If I may say so, humbly, I think it was some of the best writing I’ve ever done. Saturated: with heat, smells, love. A new city. A fog of distant desert. The golden stolen kisses of adventure. Yet now I am four months down the line, and three months heartbroken; I shall never write about Marrakesh again. The pain of that final holiday is a scar I will bear forever, and until I can learn to stop picking at it, to stop making it bleed, to merely let it be a mark on my skin, a reflection of a past life – until then, I cannot, must not, remember that city. It is for me a physical pain.

I want to write about love; I have always wanted to, when I felt it, when I didn’t. Now, I feel everything and nothing. I haven’t breathed for 12 weeks. I don’t know if I’ve had a single, clear thought. Life is a confusion, and the face that stares into my blue eyes in the mirror is all his. I do not know myself, and I do not recognise my body. I no longer belong. I knew who I was with him; I knew who I wanted to be. When he left that day he took all of that me with him. He left nothing behind, not even a hollow shell. Nothing. I have to become myself again; without him. I have to shake myself from this immense, heavy drag of exhaustion which seems to have attached itself to my soul. It is the hangover of heartbreak, and no amount of greasy food and shitty TV is going to fix it.

I didn’t write for weeks. What was there to write? It was a kill in cold-blood, all of myself shattered by the boy who sat slumped in an overcoat at the end of my bed on the final Friday in January. It makes me cry. Memory is hell. Heaven no longer exists. People say it is grief, but I have grieved before. I grieved then when I lost something; I grieve now for the loss of myself. Life was simpler before I opened Pandora’s box of sex and love. I loved before him – from afar – and that unrequited love sustained me. But when I loved close-up, it ate me whole. I suppose, crudely, little old Cupid has now regurgitated his breakfast.

Heartbreak is as isolating as a hangover. As selfish, too. Love and loss are conditions of human existence, age-old; look at Abelard, Augustine. I couldn’t have been a writer without experiencing heartbreak; I had just hoped that I might get away with it. I wanted to slip quietly under the radar, and write dreamily about break ups without any weight of emotion or personal experience. I know that is stupid; so perhaps he did me a favour. Why, then, am I so alone? So convinced that no one has ever been as desperate, as wounded, as tormented by memory, by the dashing of hope, by themselves? There are demons fighting in my head everyday. Their battles are the greatest, greater than Waterloo, bigger even than the Somme. How horribly selfish does that make me?

I am lethargic in love. I was intoxicated. Now, I am poisoned.