One day she is whole and warm and loved and the next he tells her she no longer brings joy into his life and he pushes her so far out that she now feels as if she lives in a world where the volcanos are made of ice and the sun is a small dim thing. And maybe she cries every night and maybe when she went over to her mother’s for dinner it only took her about five minutes to start crying, at which point her mother said, stop it, you’re making me feel sad.
She argues with the specter of her ex boyfriend. She hates herself for arguing and so argues more. She hates being out of college. She hates that her friends live in other cities, other states, other countries, other worlds.
She is told she should get a pet, make new friends, go out. But she knows her world has no room for others. She stacks the small joys of her life. She learns to cook. She makes new dishes and watches her favorite television show and feels warm and full. She takes baths and rereads her favorite books. She walks through her past, she still argues with his specter, but less often. She cries, but never again in front of her mother. She gets a plant and names it Squishy and tells it stories.
She reads the poetry of Sappho. She goes outside and feels the “downrushing wind that shakes the branches shake her everloving soul.” She listens to the wind at night, she listens to the leaves shaking, she lays on her heart-side and holds a pillow close to her and imagines it is someone who loves her, whom she loves, and she can hear the night winds roaming and the found trees shaking and this is how she falls asleep.
She reads the philosopher Martha Nussbaum who says, “To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, the ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control that can lead you to be shattered.” She feels as if she was shattered. She feels like an unhappy egg with hairline cracks who holds itself together by squeezing tightly. She feels as if she has been squeezing tightly for months.
She watches dozens of romance movies. She finds herself preferring teen romance films and it takes her a while to understand why, that she loves them for the possibility inherent in their endings. Watching them makes her feel the way she felt after graduating high school. It was seeing from the vantage of youth the whole of her future laid out before her, to see in those hills and valleys all the love and despair yet to come. And there in that land of her future life, in that sunbright land that seemed to shimmer in the light despite the many shadows cast by those hills, she knew that each good thing might be followed by something terrible, by heartbreak and illness and death, and yet still she chose to move forward, believing it would all be worth it. Or maybe that wasn’t the choice she made, maybe the choice inhered in the act of not stepping off the map, of continuing in the direction she had always been going, to be steadfast and as credulous as the little girl she would always in part be.
And it is these movies that remind her of that wary hope we hold onto at our best and worst moments, and she believes the sorrow and heartbreak will pass and there will be something wonderful ahead.