Grief Has No Point, and Neither Does This

Going through a breakup is raw. It’s hard to put lipstick on a piglet. It’s the kind of thing that makes you cry in a Safeway parking lot over a rotisserie chicken you’re now buying for one, and also, somehow, still miss the person who bought chicken with you before he betrayed you the way Taylor Farms lettuce just betrayed everyone who trusted it, and it turns out there was a parasite in it the whole time. The relationship and the bag of greens. And in a long and undistinguished tradition of bad decisions made while emotionally compromised, I’ve decided the correct response is to put mine on the internet. Not because my heartbreak is special. It isn’t. That’s the whole spiel, actually. We all go through some version of this, being wronged and grieving the wrongdoer, or what the wrongdoer stood for, anyway, so consider this an invitation to go through it together, or a warning, depending on how you feel about a grown woman openly grieving a basement full of unlit candles.

I process through writing, and sure, that’s just journaling with better sentences. But the real transmutation, the alchemy that actually turns the lead into something usable, happens the moment I hit publish and let strangers watch. Call it exposure therapy. Call it a mild humiliation kink, but it works.

D-day (Dump-day) was 9 days ago. I haven’t slept in a week, so I haven’t dreamed either. That’s the first casualty. Not the house, not the garden, not even the relationship. Sleep. The body simply refuses to go somewhere unconscious right now, as if it doesn’t trust me to come back.

Friday I deep cleaned my bedroom and bathroom, which is a spiritual practice disguised as a chore, and it worked, if resting a little more counts as working. Two nights of actual sleep. I’ll take it. I’m not above bargaining with cat hair and a Swiffer WetJet for a few hours of unconsciousness.

Everyone keeps asking if I’m moving back to California. It’s the logical answer. My people are there, my history is there, my job is there, albeit remote. And the plan, technically, is to go back eventually, which is the kind of sentence that sounds like a decision and functions like a stall. It’s the version of this story that makes sense on paper. When I say I’m staying in Maryland instead, the follow-up is always “why,” delivered with the particular concern people reserve for someone who’s just told them she’s memorizing the Dewey Decimal system. I don’t have an answer for them. I barely have one for myself. It just doesn’t feel right, and I don’t yet know why, which is either the beginning of self-knowledge or a very expensive way of avoiding it.

Maybe going back would feel like rewinding. Undoing three years instead of carrying them somewhere new, like returning a library book I’ve already annotated in the margins. Maybe I’m not ready to hand my hard-won independence back to a place that already has a version of me on file, open arms and all. I don’t have a tidy answer. I just know that every time I picture the road heading west, it feels less like homecoming and more like admitting defeat with better weather. Maybe staying is a stubborn attempt to change the ending.

All I know is there’s some part of me, hard to locate most days, buried under moving boxes and grief and the particular exhaustion of having to introduce myself to new neighbors. That wants to carve this city into a spoon and taste what it makes, rather than whittle myself back down to the last known place, even if my soul already knows, with the smug certainty of a soul that has seen this movie before, that I’ll end up back on a beach with tacos eventually. Some parts of you are just West Coast. You can move them to Maryland. You cannot convince them.

Saturday I went to the gym, had lunch with a friend, scoped out a neighborhood like a woman casing her own future. Sunday a realtor showed me two rentals and it made me nervous in a way that had nothing to do with square footage. Well. It had a little to do with square footage. The math of doing this alone is setting in. It’s a lot of trepidation for one Sunday.

I know I shouldn’t spend so much time on this, but I’m going to miss this house. My gut feels punched watching someone methodically move his life out of it in boxes, like he’s defrosting a freezer, one careful shelf at a time. We arrived here on Thanksgiving 2024, Thai food eaten in a Residence Inn in Missouri as our celebratory meal after a day of cross-country driving. My poor cat, Louie, was so stressed he hid inside an armchair the entire time we ate off a linoleum kitchenette in a room that smelled so distinctly of curry the walls sweat turmeric when we showered that night.

It snowed the night we got here, my first residential snow. Two weeks later my whole life arrived in a truck, right before Christmas, because nothing says fresh start like unpacking your entire personality in December.

That winter we unpacked, walked the new town in the cold, made the place lived-in. I loved that part. The spreading out, everything finally finding its home, the particular satisfaction of deciding which drawer the good scissors live in now. In January we adopted a kitten. By May I’d started the garden I’d always dreamed of. It lasted four months, which in retrospect tracks. Barely into spring I learned the truth about an addiction I hadn’t seen. I learned the person I loved and shared a space with had been lying to me with a fluency I previously assumed was reserved for serial killers and mid-level politicians.

Summer, he left for two months, and I stayed and kept the house standing, raised the kitten, made new friends, and watched the garden bloom anyway. And my god, did it bloom, obscene and unbothered, like it hadn’t gotten the memo that the heart that planted it was already breaking. He always got to leave. Physically, spiritually, whichever came first, he had a gift for exiting. I know how to be alone and do it well. I am just so tired of proving that particular skill, over and over, like it’s a certification that expires every fortyear.

I went down to my candle studio tonight and sobbed, which is not a metaphor, that is a literal description of a Sunday afternoon an hour east of Baltimore, in case anyone was hoping this was going somewhere more poetic. Six years of supplies down there, organized by color and type like a spectrum waiting patiently to be useful again. ROYGBIV, or whatever, arranged with the kind of devotion usually reserved for spice racks. More devotion, frankly, than I ever got out of the actual relationship. I was so excited to finally have a whole room for this. I used to blast music down there and fill orders and lose entire hours to wax and wick, the good kind of losing time, the kind you don’t notice until your neck hurts and back aches. I haven’t made anything in months. It hurts to imagine tearing it down, and it hurts just as much to admit I haven’t felt safe enough, here, of all places, to make anything at all.

Same story in the kitchen. I finally had a dishwasher, a first in all my decades of renting, real counter space, a place for every gadget a person could ask for, and I learned to bake. Bread every week. Tortillas from scratch. Desserts tabbed in thrifted cookbooks with the reverence usually reserved for relics, which, in fairness, is what they were becoming. I wanted to feed a village. I settled for feeding one man who, it turns out, was also quietly starving me in ways bread can’t fix. Now the kitchen spirit is vacant. No life in the room that’s supposed to hold the most of it.

There’s no remnant of him in this house. I built it. But he’s making his exit final right now, and it’s hard, and I don’t want him to see how hard, I don’t want to hand him that particular satisfaction, because apparently watching me suffer is, in his own words, gratifying. Which is either the most honest thing he’s ever said to my face, or the cruelest thing he said a year before he proved it, I genuinely can’t tell which, and I’ve had nine days to think about it.

Part of me is envious he can fold three years into boxes so easily, so swiftly, without remorse or affect, like grief is optional and he simply opted out, the way some people opt out of The Morning Brew. I don’t know how much of my pain is the house and how much is the relationship. When I say I’m not ready to leave, I worry some part of me means the relationship, not the address. Three years isn’t long, in the grand scheme. But a dream died this month, and it wasn’t my fault that it did.

Earnestly, I’m scared (stupid, get it?). I know I can survive anything, a friend told me I always land on my feet, like a cat, and she’s right, but I’m still scared. Scared to start over. New city, new routines, a community to nurture and build. Scared to survive my first winter completely alone. Above everything, I’m heartbroken to leave my orange tabby, my actual baby, who sleeps against me every night and comes for cuddles on the good nights and the swollen ones alike. Losing that is the one thing I cannot think my way through. Some griefs don’t respond to intelligence. They just sit there, furred and warm and leaving anyway.

I know the truth about the relationship. I read my own evidence log daily, and it holds, and there’s no regret in the decision itself. He didn’t break the boundary by accident, the way you break a glass. He broke it the way you break a lease, deliberately, with a plan for what came after. Which, as it happens, is exactly what we’re now doing to the actual lease, so at least the metaphor had the decency to be honest.

What I’m grieving is smaller and looser than the decision: the moments that felt real anyway. The partnership. The adventures. The hours of conversation about things nobody else seemed to care about. The care that seemed there, right alongside promises that got broken without a second thought. He wasn’t sorry he did it. He was sorry I found out on my own, without a script from him, without the courtesy of a confession. Even the ending, apparently, wasn’t his to give me honestly. That’s the cruelty of cognitive dissonance, two things that feel true at the same time but cannot both survive the math, because you cannot call it love and also call it harm and keep the sum. It’s a spiral, fondness and memory and shattered hope all occupying the same body at once, pieces of me sprawled inside my ribs and stuck in the walls and caught somewhere between the vents.

Every relationship I’ve been in, I’ve been the one to end it. It’s been difficult and gut-wrenching every single time. I’ve lived with every partner, which means I’ve dissolved a shared home more times than I care to admit, more times, frankly, than my parents ever have, who if they’d done this even once, purely for my professional development, might have spared me the material for this entire blog. More times than feels survivable, and yet here I am, surviving it again. This time was supposed to be different. This time I felt something align, some sense that no matter where I stood on a map, I could call this person home. This time I had the most hope I’ve ever had walking into something. The most age, the most wisdom, the most experience under my belt. I thought I was finally choosing differently.

Instead I’m three thousand miles from everything I’ve ever known, minus the two years I spent building a home that isn’t mine to keep, in a state whose motto, I recently learned, is “Fatti Maschii, Parole Femine,” archaic 16th-century Italian for “manly deeds, womanly words,” which feels less like a coincidence and more like Maryland, and my ancestors, personally trolling me.

There’s no lesson at the bottom of this. I’m not going to pretend there is one just to give you, or me, a digestible meal. Grief doesn’t resolve on schedule and it doesn’t owe anyone a moral, or manly deed. Sometimes it’s just a woman standing in a basement full of unlit candles, crying over wax she can’t bring herself to touch, because touching it would mean admitting the version of her life that made those candles is over. That’s it. That’s the whole post. I felt something, and I wrote it down, and now you’ve felt a little of it too. That was always the only point.