Merry Christmas, Please Don't Call.

On surviving heartbreak over the holidays and - shit I think my prefrontal cortex just developed.

Christmas Eve, 2022 I returned home with a suitcase, a cat, and a broken heart. I came back from my bubble of city living to my small hometown and back to my single bed in my parent’s house. It had been six months, I’d thought I’d be over it by now but something about Christmas bought it all back up in my throat. I couldn’t distract myself back here. I’d see him everywhere; phantom reflections in cars driving past and supermarket windows.

I’d lie in bed listening to the hum of the boiler wondering how long it would take for this ache to disappear from my chest. Everything felt raw and bloody, and I was sure I was the first person to ever feel like this. Sometimes, I’d think this heavy ache was going to pull me straight through the floorboards. As it turned to morning and I lay there unable to sleep, I’d stare at the glow of my phone under the sheets and think - ‘Merry Christmas, please don’t call.’

Nostalgia and Christmas walk hand in hand together, when you combine that with a breakup, it’s not long before you start imagining what this year should have been like. Your routines had blended together, the morning at one family’s, the afternoon at the next. You get used to waking up together, interlocking fingers underneath the table and all the other habits of love you take for granted. Fused together, it’s hard to imagine a world where you’re not. So, when you return to your childhood home alone to what should be your safe space, it feels broken and wrong. Like you’ve stepped into the wrong timeline where everything now burns blue.

‘When male and female Anglerfish mate together, they literally melt into each other and share one body, forever intertwined. The deep sea is so vast that if they manage to find one another in the dark, the male eats into her soft side and fuses into her. He loses his eyes, organs, and everything that made him a fish until eventually, they even share one bloodstream. Is this not an apt description of love?’ (Excerpt from my essay ‘How To Be Single’)'

For the majority of December 2022, my fingers stayed hovering over his name in my phone, begging him not to do it either.

If this year, you’re debating breaking no contact with your ex, this is your sign not to.

“How do you process grief?

“By running from it until it finds me on a warm day in the middle of a sunny street”

“Do you think you ever get over your first love?” A new friend in London says to me,

“It just takes time.” I say back, and I hate myself for saying such an unhelpful cliche and even more for knowing it’s true.

‘Time heals all wounds’, I remember thinking this was the most annoying statement at the time, how does that help me now? But then someone else told me the secret - there’s nothing you can do to make it go faster or disappear, you just have to feel it. Sit in that uncomfortable feeling until it becomes comfortable again.

You can’t find someone new to paint over the pain from it, you can’t go out all the time, you can’t convince yourself you hate them, you just have to be uncomfortable for a while and each day you’ll think of them less, and one day you will wake up and the ache in your chest will be gone. Maybe we need to reframe heartbreak in our twenties, how lucky am I to have loved and to have paid the price with loss. Once created, love has to go somewhere after all.

“And when I turned to face grief, I saw that it was love just in a heavy coat.”

It’s December 2024, and I’ve come home from Christmas. Life is very different now. Nina and I did the dreaded route from Euston back to the midlands; my parents picked me up from the station and we chatted and laughed. That night, I met up with friends and we talked about our new lives, and our new habits, and our new love stories, then I came back to my parent’s home and sprawled out in bed alone. Then I noticed it, or rather the absence of it, I did not feel lonely anymore. My favourite thing at the moment is when things don’t work out, then you take some time and notice that everything really did after all.

A few years ago I was stressed talking to my ex about a friend and their boyfriend; “One day, you’ll see her on a completely normal day, and she’ll be happy and loved. Maybe married with a few kids, and you’ll realise you worried for nothing and it all happened how it was meant to” He said, his advice was not meant for me but I soften as I think about it.

I want you to know that to write this I had to reach under the floorboards of my heart to find remnant memories of the pain I felt those years ago and it’s hard to grasp. Like a small breath from a different lifetime I have to coax it up to remember how it felt and this means one day, your pain will be hard to put a finger on too. Humans are clever, it’s in our very DNA to forget how things hurt, so we get up, we put our nice clothes on, we smile at new people and look for love again.

If you’re struggling this Christmas, you won’t always, those bad periods will feel like a stuffy dream. Christmas will be just yours again.

I go to the supermarket and I don’t look for him in the fruit aisle, and I go for coffee and I don’t hear his voice ordering. I see my friends and I don’t see his face across the room in a crowded bar - it’s just me.

Merry Christmas, (please don’t call)

-Shit, I think my prefrontal cortex just developed.

Note to all my lovely London subscribers, I'm doing my first ever book club in February and I’d love to see you there x