Ritual

The Breakup Ritual

Again and again, we meet here

Do you remember the night we talked on the phone and you read me poetry? That is one of my favorite memories of our time together. No man had ever read poetry to me before.

You looked up my favorite poem on your phone, written by the man we both named as our favorite poet (kismet, right?), and you read it so slowly and passionately. I murmured along with you all the lines I knew by heart. And when you got to my favorite part — “with her hurting, sexual smell” — you skipped the best word in that line and I immediately knew the website you were on had censored it. I yelped in protest.

You looked at me, across the 400-mile distance between our screens, and asked me what it was supposed to say. I gave you the uncensored line, and you turned back to your screen and started that stanza over, so studiously, so seriously, so arduously.

We looked at each other for a long time when you finished reading, the slightest of smiles on our faces.

I was so in love with you.

MEMORY

In the immediate aftermath, we visit here over and over and over again. We keep one another alive by re-reading the text threads, the emails. Listening to the last voicemail in which someone said, “I love you,” or that one video message with the long, smoldering gaze that holds a promise behind the declaration, “I want you so much.”

We look at the photos of two faces with the exact same jubilant smiles. The ridiculous selfies of kisses and cuddles, evidence that even the most stoic of us can turn into teenagers when we fall in love. And of course, we covet those more daring snapshots, the ones in our Hidden folder, because those memories are perhaps the most painful and the most precious, those moments of the deepest intimacy we never want to forget.

But one day, we look at these less and less. Eventually, a week goes by and we realize that we got through it all without needing to hear that voice, or see that cherished brightness in a pair of eyes that once loved to behold us.

In time, we delete an email here or there. Perhaps all of them. Maybe we even wipe the text thread.

The printed photos end up in the trash — except maybe one or two. The digital copies end up in the recycle bin — except maybe one or two.

One day, all that is left is the faintest memory of the sound of someone’s laugh. The way they touched you in that one spot that made you melt down to your toes. A sidelong glance that made you feel like you would never feel alone again.

Everything else fades into a soft haze.

“I have every intention of being in your life for years to come,” you said.

“Your feelings matter to me. They matter so much.”

“I will never do to you what they did. I will never walk away like that.”

“I think you’re the love of my life…”

“What if we built a second floor on your house? We can put the kids’ rooms up there, set them up with a few movies, and spend the rest of the day making love down here.”

The light from my bedroom window shone through the crack in the curtains and lit up your face as you said that last one, and we laughed, then kissed, then rolled into another embrace that required the use of every limb.

THE ACCOUNTING

Is this our favorite part of the ritual? When we review the documents, thumbing through the pages, highlighting, raising an accusing eyebrow, passing the documents back and forth across the table?

“Here, here, and here,” we say, pointing to each breach of contract.

There’s a strange satisfaction to it.

You didn’t come home when you said you would. You yelled when you promised you wouldn’t. You didn’t pay those bills and we had to deal with the penalty fees. You said I could keep the house. You were supposed to take the kids on Saturdays. You never picked your dirty socks up off the floor.

You promised you wouldn’t leave me.

You said you loved me.

What lies in between these strings of broken agreements? What held us together even as these agreements were slowly coming undone? Were there a million little offenses that we didn’t bother to catalog? Were the hurried kisses and five-minute cuddles on school nights not enough to bandage over the dropped balls, forgotten obligations, and general human laziness?

What will we get from this ritual? From all the highlighting, from pushing these breached contracts back and forth across the table? Will they earn us compensatory damages? Will this accounting allow for new agreements to be made?

Does any of it really matter in light of the one breach that can never be righted?

You said you loved me.

Why did you befriend me if you could not be friend enough to stick around after the breakup? Why did you break up with me, at all? I still do not know. Your answers were confusing and did not make sense in light of your behavior.

Why did you do this? Why did you break every promise you made to me? Why did you disappear? Why did you pretend I didn’t exist? That this had never happened?

Why didn’t you tell me something — anything — that might have explained your behavior? Why didn’t you tell me you needed some time and would revisit the subject later? Why didn’t you apologize for all the erratic behavior, all the broken promises?

Why didn’t you say something? Anything?

THE QUESTIONS

The meeting turned out to be less than fruitful. No concessions were made. No apologies were issued. No resolve was surrendered.

There are no new agreements to be made. Nothing could be done but to condemn the old structures and schedule the demolition.

We ask again and again. We change the order of the words. We try synonyms.

Eventually, we pare it down to just three letters: W-H-Y?

Empty eyes look back at us, those same eyes that we once spent hours staring into, making love to just through the act of gazing. Blank expressions abound. Not even confusion — just a void. A void that feels like it will swallow us whole if we remain in its presence for too long.

Yet we cannot help but ask one or two more times.

Why? Please tell me why.

We don’t heed the warning. We tread too closely.

The void consumes us.

There are no answers there. There are no questions, either. Just a big space of nothingness.

Do you know that I’ve picked up some of your tics? I noticed recently that I occasionally lift up the side of my lip when I’m talking, just like you do. I sometimes even try (without conscious thought) to curl my lips a bit more inward with a slow smile, trying to make little curves at the corners of my mouth.

You know the ones I mean. Those lines that I kissed so many times. Those lines that made my heart race. Those lines I loved so very much.

I can’t make them appear on my own face no matter how much I try. I don’t even know why I try. Perhaps it is my body’s way of trying to remember you. Or perhaps I’m simply marked forever by being in the presence of your smile.

I sound like you, too. If you were here to listen or to read my words, you would notice. Somehow, your idiolect bled into mine. Your style, diction, and tone have made their way into my writing.

You tore my page out of your book down to the binding, exorcising me in staunch absolutism from your story…but these parts of you came with me, despite that.

Did you hear me? Some of your story came with me.

I wonder if some of mine went with you, too.

SURRENDER

There is no answer. There will never be an answer.

One day, we find ourselves unable to see the best in the person we loved so much. One day, we might lose sight of anything we loved, at all.

Maybe it’s inevitable. Maybe we could’ve prevented it, but we fumbled one too many times. Maybe we were lazy and selfish. Maybe we simply grew apart.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. No sense can be made of it.

We retrieve the shovel and walk out into the deep woods, into the darkest shadows, the hidden places where our pain will be held and comforted in Mother Earth’s forgiving embrace.

We leave with dirt smeared across our faces and a stiff back. The shovel rings with a series of metallic clangs as we drag it behind us.

One day, a long time from now, you will remember. You will remember how much I loved you and you will feel it in your body like a tidal wave.

And you might even remember that you loved me, too. Someday. A long time from now.

Be careful when that moment comes. It will drown you if you aren’t careful.

RECKONING

One day it will come. It is as simple and as brutally mysterious as that.

We will know for sure — the knowing of the heart, not the mind — that there was love, once. Somewhere. Within one heart, at least — perhaps both.

And somehow, the love was all of it: the mess, the pain, the bloody battle.

The love was all of it.

© Yael Wolfe 2022

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