Essential Listening: Breakup Edition
A list of songs and accompanying advice that actually got me through it. An essay on grief, heartbreak, and how I promise he really is just a man.
My philosophy professor once asked us what we thought love was, I don’t remember what point he was trying to prove. I told him what was important was the choice to keep loving someone. I had never fallen in love before, but with no relatives who had stayed married nothing seemed more romantic than making the choice to be with someone. He didn’t like this answer. I still don’t believe that I am the kind of person who wants to “fall”, I want a love where I can feel my feet firmly planted on the ground.
This playlist is compiled by the girl whose favorite movies are all rom-coms. Who believes secretly, shamefully, that the thing I am searching for, above all else, is a comfortable, quiet, but beautiful love. Beautiful like the first snowfall or the way sunlight filters down through the trees. From the girl for whom every heartache does feel like a breaking. When I’m being flippant I blame it on my Venus in Capricorn, which, hypothetically, craves stability. However, when I’m being my most raw, in late-night sleepover conversations with my best friends, I confess it's because there’s something beautiful and uniquely human about a stable, lasting relationship. Something alive. Heartbreak is the mourning of what could have been just as much as what was. The secret is that heartbreak is a forest fire, it hurts, it's cyclical, and it seems senselessly cruel. It leaves scorch marks. You can’t listen to music those first painful weeks and you cross streets to avoid places you were once a regular. But, like a forest fire, the burning feeds the soil and promotes new, healthy growth.
Strangers - Ethel Cain
“I just wanted to be yours/can I be yours/just tell me I'm yours/if I’m turning in your stomach and making you feel sick/Am I making you feel sick?”
This song uses cannibalism as a metaphor for an unhealthy and all-consuming love.
I listened to this song on repeat as I walked around my campus at dusk in early February. The waterfall behind my freshman residence hall was frozen into beautiful icicles that glistened with light that leaked out from the gothic stone building. I thought that returning to where we met would ground me and allow me to let go. I was filled with memories of the weeks before I met him, that 80-degree spring reminded me of home. I remember feeling manically happy watching things come back to life. I was reading my now favorite book and I’d made some of what are now my closest friends.
If you take steps to heal, going through the hardest part early on, sitting in the deepness of the pain only then you can move through it. My best friend tells me that sometimes things pick at an old scab, being broken up with brings up, for many, childhood fears of being abandoned by those you love.
Sun Bleached Flies - Ethel Cain
I used to think spring was the easiest time to believe in God, but that’s just because I’d never experienced real pain. After the breakup, which at the time I thought was the end of love, I clung to God like a child. Knowing that he would only abandon me if I chose Him to. I saw His beauty in the trees and spoke to the moon as if she could hear me. Thank god she never listened to my pleas to bring Him back to me.
“I forgive it all as it comes back to me/if it’s meant to be it will be/ so I met him there and I told him I believe”
I went to church of my own volition for the first time in a decade. I sat in the pew not thinking of God, but of my parents and me as a child. I remembered a different lit-up cross and the way it felt to feel safe, wrapped up in the arms of something that felt like the almighty.
All Things Must Pass — George Harrison
Even beautiful things aren’t meant to last forever.
I didn’t write when I was with him. He was insecure so I’d hold the sides of his face and tell him he was beautiful. When we broke up he said through wet eyes that he didn’t think I ever loved him, but just thought he was attractive. The first time I crossed his path after I stopped loving him I noticed he walked with hunched shoulders and careful tip-toeing steps, he had grown out his curly hair, that I taught him how to take care of, and finally bought the shoes I’d always told him he should replace his worn out Asics with. I realized he had only ever been beautiful because I loved him.
The weeks after we broke up I’d go out for walks under the winter sun. The sun decorated my nose with freckles. I ate cherries in bed under a colorful quilt with the window open. I drew poorly, the oil pastel residue marking everything in my room. The brief moments I felt okay was when I heard my friend’s laughter, which was as beautiful as a bird song. Going to cluttered antique stores, singing along to Stevie Nicks, and having friends who never got tired of listening to me cry taught me that love, like God, was everywhere, and if I looked I could find evidence of it in everything.
Glow Worms - Vashti Bunyan
I listened to “Just Another Diamond Day”, the album Glow Worms is on when I realized I was slowly getting better. I put the album on and wandered through the Houston Fine Arts Museum long after the friend that I’d come with left. I would be stopped by a rogue photographer and asked if I’d ever tried modeling. To which, with tear streaks running through my concealer, I’d say I’d never been comfortable in front of the camera.
I began to focus on the things that I could control. I started journaling everyday and began to read “all about love” by bell hooks. I still haven’t finished the last 20 pages. I wanted to be the version of myself that loved in a way I was proud of. I learned to trust that one day I would run into the person I would build a forever for, but I wanted to rebuild myself into someone who was whole and fulfilled without them.
“Loving, living more with love to stay/long past sadness that was in our way”
Picture Me Better - Weyes Blood
Understand that you are not the person that they left anymore. They are definitely not the person that you loved.
The last time I would ever talk to my ex would be a month to the day after the breakup. When I saw him again I realized that I still loved him. I could feel a softness in the way that I looked at him and how attuned I still was to him. His smell was still comforting. Three months later, when I was falling in love with someone new, I found a shirt of his that smelled peppery and made me feel like sneezing. I’d throw it out without a second thought. When we met I could see in his eyes how distant he had become from me. He couldn’t reach back into that love he once had, even if he wanted to, the way I could. He told me specifically why he hadn’t felt loved by me. My friends would tell me that he was wrong, that it was easy to love me, that they loved me. That he was just telling me these things to hurt me.
Now I know he did say some of those things to hurt me, but I didn’t want anyone to ever see me that way again.
I Have Considered the Lilies — Connie Converse
There’s something about the aftermath of a breakup that forces you to sit in the quiet, there’s only so long you can distract yourself. At first the silence and the thoughts are painful, but eventually you see the beauty that still exists in others, your friends, the nice lady who complimented you on your shoes, the scary teenage girl who liked your eyeliner, or the man who cuts your hair and his love for his cat who you love to hear stories about. He’s the only one who will be able to convince you that the aftermath of a breakup is not the time to get bangs.
I Wish You Love – Sam Cooke
I know that I am healed when the only song that makes me think of someone, in this case a him, is Sam Cooke’s “I Wish You Love”. A song that holds all lost friends, lovers, and family that I no longer speak to. A sentiment left over from my Sunday school teacher telling me that the most important people to pray for every night before you go to bed are those that have hurt you. Hate is a sickness, she’d tell us.
“My breaking heart and I agree/That you and I could never be/So, with my best, my very best/I set you free.