Well. It had to end sometime.

It’s scary though, isn’t it? How fast the switch can flip? You don’t even know what’s wrong yourself; you didn’t ask for this, you didn’t want this, but there’s nothing you can do. When it’s gone, it’s gone. You can cling to it, but that’s almost worse, because you can feel the phoniness of the situation in stark, loathsome contrast to the quickly fading dream it used to be. And with every consecutive pounding heartbeat, it echoes “Wrong, wrong, wrong.”

So then it’s limbo land for the both of you, even if one of you is only there by force—no switch was flipped for them, but they know the signs, and there’s no going back to bliss whence done away is ignorance. So you sit there. Looking at the person and feeling frustrated and scared that so many feelings you used to have for them are being played like a home movie in your head. They’re sketchy and muted, and somehow always seem like they’re leaving something out.

I don’t know if this happens to everyone—maybe it doesn’t. Maybe some people just like watching home movies more than filming new ones. I like to think there’s some third option—that one day after years of refusing to sell or toss the now almost unusable, unplayable, unbearable cassettes with their mangled tape and cracked plastic exterior, that for one instant the VCR will play, and instead of watching from the couch, you’re sucked back into it all; remembering and feeling and filming again all at once.

A complete and total resurrection.

But then I’m reminded of the story of the American soldier overseas. This is bound to have some inaccuracies, but here’s what I remember. This marine—he gets news while on tour that his wife had a baby, and the next day in battle, he’s killed by an enemy soldier. Fortunately, the medics were able to bring him back to life, and, due to his weakened state, he’s sent home early. Soldier flies back, planning to surprise his wife and baby girl. Gets to the airport, grabs a taxi and BOOM—car crash on the way home. Dead.

How many resurrections is one person allowed?

I don’t know why it’s easier, but abstracting things to the land of metaphors and anecdotes relieves some of the feelings from the situation. I think I’ll be skeptical the next time I hear someone prattle about ‘zen’ or any of that. They chose not to rejoin the living. I’ll come back. It won’t be too long.

I’ve been on both sides now, and it’s funny how they compare. When you go to limbo, you feel guilt. When you’re brought, you feel shame. Going to limbo after you recognize the absence of that feeling that by all accounts should still be present is…uncomfortable. You still feel the footprints of the feelings you had; you can still see the paths you walked and the history you shared. But it’s gone, and while you battle for a bit to bring it back, eventually you accept that the light has gone out and there’s nothing to do but continue on another path. But you know the other person had as little to do with the switch as you did—by God, even less! So how do you explain? How do you take someone standing with two feet in the ground, and tell them they’re a ghost to you now? And so you feel guilt.

But the chances are that 9 times out of 10, the person knows they’re being taken to limbo. They can feel themselves start to fade, and like any dying soul, begin to question—was I not careful enough? When did this happen? How could this happen? And the most pathetically true, and the most cliché, What did I do wrong? Then they hear themselves ask this, and they hate themselves for it, but the hate cannot halt the question from whispering in the day, and screaming in the night What, what, WHAT did I do wrong? And so they feel shame.

So that’s what limbo is—the realm of the guilty leading the shameful. But guilt is much more easily assuaged if for the only reason that it gets boring to constantly feel guilty. So sooner or later, the guilty one leaves like a pagan after penance, content that they are clean, while the shameful one flounders in the font waiting for a lifeline that no one will throw. But like I said, the choice to rejoin the living is always there.

With that aside, I think the hardest thing is to remember how things have happened the next time you run into them. Human beings have a sick, perverted penchant for both misremembering and for ignorant optimism. So if you do run across the dreaded ‘X’ (a superb idiom in our language), it rarely matters if you were the guilty or the shameful, though admittedly the shameful are slightly more at risk. When you see this person, you feel someone blowing dust off those home movies—ones that you haven’t seen in so long that they almost seem new. And you’re captured by the vague familiarity of it, and the novelty of it that comes from the gaps in your poorly evolved memory, making it the perfect sweet-and-salty combination for your consciousness. In a burst of passion, you think, “Oh this one—this one’s my favorite!”, but it’s not. It’s just a dusty old movie with the same beginning, middle, and end that it’s always had. But it’s hard, so hard, to put it away. So you don’t. You keep it playing in the background—you eat, do the dishes, go to work, and even go to the theaters while catching snippets of it here and there, and smiling.

You can keep that thing on forever. It’s just going to end in an oversized electric bill and a film so over-watched you can’t stand the sight of it anymore. Unless I’m wrong of course, and you really are sucked into TV Land. But I doubt it. Just once I’d like to see a movie that starts with a breakup. We’re all very good at making love happen, and if you’re personally lacking then there’s about a million and one instruction manuals on your neighbor’s Netflix. But that makes us a mechanic with a Lego manual for a car—no idea how to troubleshoot because you don’t understand it well enough to build in the first place. So we just assume that once a car gets dirty, we have to get a new one. I’m not saying every problem is as simple as going to a car wash, but who would know?

And by the way, it’s not the cynics who have trouble with this—with any of it. It’s the damn romantics. Cynics don’t worry about home movies; about framing the perfect shot or editing it to look different than it was, and they sure as hell don’t rewatch them expecting to jump back in. They don’t seek the satisfied feelings that are sure to come with riding off into the sunset with that special person, which is why, when the sun sets and the light is gone, they don’t lose their minds over this moment interrupting their feeling of CONSTANT FULFILLMENT. They don’t seek that. They don’t build up their emotional state from a base of [long walks on the] sand and [watching sunsets on the] water. It’s the romantics who look at their evaporating cities and set off again, either in guilt or in shame, to repeat the same story with the same characters and only slightly different actors. Love doesn’t belong on screen.

But I’m getting off topic. The point is not to find a recipe or an equation to make things work. It’s to acknowledge that they’re not. Working, that is. And it doesn’t matter if you’re the guilty one or the shameful one—that epiphany is an epiphany for both. That’s how you get out of limbo.