There is something uniquely terrible about the instant you realize, with complete certainty/clarity, that he is going to leave you, and no miracle that you (or a shaman. Ok, maybe a shaman) could perform can change that. Before the raging storm that is your tears, the quick and never fully encompassing psychoanalysis with your friends, before the aching loneliness (which you assume will come, because everyone always says it will. Aching’t it?).

It’s a quiet. Like a desert waiting to swallow the dunes of sand softy undulating over its waist, hiding a dozen deathly traps you must navigate to get to the next oasis. This barren, desolate wasteland is the breakup, and the oasis is supposedly, healing. You know it’s out there (again, because everyone says it is), but why does everyone assume you want to get to it?

What if you like the desert’s fiery climate that causes your lips to crack in pain in protest? What of you enjoy the blisteringly cold nights? What if you want to go in the other direction from whence you came? No one actually likes a desert, right? What if the lush and gorgeous terrain you hail from made sense, and you honestly don’t think there could be a land more beautiful than the one you left?

You still feel surprise when he walks out the door, because you thought somehow your love would be enough, had to be enough. (By the way, apparently, it never is. But what would I know, I’m in a desert) You thought that somehow his mind would change, because your mind definitely wasn’t going to. You thought that if you bought him this, or did that for him, he would stay. You’ve watched too many movies about the ultimate sacrifice and people being together at all odds (and ironically, for the movies that don’t turn out like that, you always think those girls are idiots for thinking that they could change him) and you were hoping that would be you. It isn’t. And you cannot seem to comprehend that there is a life…without him. (Which, you FULLY realize is incredibly stupid, because life’s a bitch, and it will force you to move on, even if you really, really don’t want to. Against your best wishes, you will not wither and die because you are now alone/lonely/single, and he will not come back because he has watched you cry. You probably just wanted him to see it so that he fully understands how deeply this hurts, because everyone knows, you’re not a crier)

You try and figure out how this oasis will be reached. Shall you magnify his flaws so that you forget his love? Set him up with someone else? Revenge fuck? Become a nun? Drown yourself in series and work until the automatic pilot you are operating on becomes you again, and you are able to semi-feel, semi-live, semi-love, a gradual journey to full-fledged reality and general over-himness?

He makes a joke as he leaves your heart in tattered, raggedy pieces, and you realize he is well on the way to this so-called oasis. You can’t help but hope that he will be miserable without you (even though that logical, ANNOYING voice in your head laughs in disbelief at your infantile faith that he cannot live without you) and 20 years from now, he will come back crawling (lips cracked) for a great blowjob and some great love. And then there is numbness, then normalcy, then nothing.

Then you blog, and wait.

tSN