Short-Term, Open to Long

On losing love, buddhism, and shit - I think my prefrontal cortex just developed.

Song of the week: Favourite - Fontaines D.C.

“If someone writes you one sonnet, they love you. If they write you a 100 sonnets, they just really love writing sonnets.”

This morning, as I got out of the shower I put my hair up in my favourite claw clip. It’s brown tortoiseshell and a gift from my Sister. I wear it religiously most days and as I got ready to start another day of writing, I felt it break. My hair suddenly free and loose down my back, I pulled out the cracked shards of plastic nestled in there - it wasn’t fixable.

It reminded me of my first boyfriend’s Mum, who I still miss, I’d lost a necklace and she told me about how in Buddhist practice, they learn how you should live as if the thing you love is already broken. I didn’t understand it at the time, I found it frustrating. Knowing something was doomed to end wouldn’t make me enjoy it more at all, and embracing the idea of impermanence sounded awful. I have always wanted everything to last forever.

On Thursday, my best friend asked me to go to the theatre, I met her there at 7 and to my horror she had surprised me with some sort of double date. I felt disgusting after being at work all day, my hair pulled back in that same claw clip and having been on tubes all day.

“I knew you wouldn’t come if I told you.” She said, and I knew she had a point.

Luckily, we went into the dark and packed theatre and I waited for it to be over. We saw 1536, a play about three women’s lives as they get news from London about Anne Boleyn’s trial and execution. I don’t say this lightly, it was one of the best plays I’d ever watched. You know a play is particularly good when a man walks out during one monologue, declaring it shit and sexist. The women in the play grapple their relationships with men, working out how to walk the line of pious yet sexy against the ever changing standards of those setting it. They talk about how if you do too much you’ll never get the ultimate reward - marriage.

Luckily for me, it’s not 1536 but as I sit next to this random man, I think about my ex-boyfriend and the idea of forever. I’d been considering it a complete failure for the fact it had only lasted six months or so. My brain had turned to a rubix cube. Turning over the events again and again trying to make it make sense. I have always been this way, as is evident from all of these essays I write, I talk and talk about love being this great tragedy that I have been victim of. My situationship article is testament to that;

“That in a generation of disposable everything; where your straw dissolves before you’ve even finished drinking and where it’s not cool to even have a favourite restaurant - I wanted something biblical. Something historic.” - From my essay, ‘What The Fuck Is A Situationship’

I had to get an uber home after the theatre, and as I said goodbye to these new people and drove home, I realised life is actually quite fun if you let it and I wished I had been enjoying it more. I was never going to see these men again, yet they’d been interesting to talk to for one night. Instead of trying to turn temporary people into forever, I wished I had just appreciated letting things be.

“I have been a sort of thief. Getting dressed up in my nicest clothes and I doing my hair the way they might like it. I listened to their stories, memorised their laugh, imprinted their pain, jotted down the way their eyes lit up as they spoke about home. When I’d get home I’d write it all down in my diary, imprisoning this person into my life forever. Making them a part of me forever when they hadn’t ever wanted to be.”

I think again about my best friend who is Australian, one day her visa will run out or she will tire of London and she will go home, but that doesn’t mean I’ll love her any less in the meantime.

After ending a long term relationship and being single for the first time ever at 23, it was hard to adjust to the idea of this when it came to dating, but even though there have been painful moments as there are in any lifetime - there have also been some really nice ones and I think maybe I’d do well to remember that too. People aren’t bad just because they didn’t work out. I have this thing where it’s like the opposite of rose-tinted glasses, I remember all their bad bits instead, maybe that’s not healthy either.

• When I was seventeen, I lost my favourite denim jacket and he met me at the bus stop after college with one he found in a charity shop that was a close match. He’d spent all day looking for one close enough.

• When I was nineteen, and he’d meet me after parties to walk me home and he’d walk barefoot so I could wear his trainers as my feet hurt.

• When I was twenty-two and I broke up with him and he told me he didn’t hate me for it and that he hoped I would become everything I wanted.

• When I was twenty-three and a guy I’d just met took me on a picnic and bought me this picnic blanket to sit on. He’d planned the whole thing and bought my favourite flowers, lilies.

• When I was twenty-four, the guy I was briefly seeing was travelling around Vietnam and bought back a yellow flower claw clip he’d thought I’d like, alongside some matcha because I always talked about it.

• When I was twenty-five and sick, so he’d made a big elaborate salad in the hopes it would make me feel better.

These are just a small handful of moments that flash up in my mind as I try to remember. I think it’s funny as I read this back because there are way bigger more elaborate things that people I’ve dated have done, but these are the moments that have stuck out. It is so much easier to think of the bad than the good. And these are just romantic, my platonic displays of love over the years have been incomparable.

When I think back on my love affairs, what preceded them and followed suit, it’s always the shortest, most capricious bursts of romance that leave a lasting impact. They’re what I write and think about. Rewind the tape when I’m alone and hormonal and a little desperate, watch it like a montage until the tape gets stuck. A pocketful of moments, one more potent than the other. And I know that it’s unrealistic and probably unhealthy to call it love, but why wouldn’t I? That’s not love, you’ll say, you don’t even know these people. I’d counter you with well, what is love to you anyway? - Valerie, Club Reticent,

I throw my broken claw clip away and think for the first time I understood what my ex’s Mother had meant, there is beauty in accepting impermanence. My great fear of losing something important to me had happened yet nothing but everything had changed, I was still me.

Are love stories fragmented across your twenties not real just because they don’t last? I don’t think so. I’ve always been determined I’m not made for casual, but all it’s done is make me hold on longer than I was meant to. Maybe part of life is being ready to say thank you for the experience and then move on. People are experiences, not possessions.

-Shit, I think my prefrontal cortex just developed.