The end of the beginning. Hello, New York.
Anonymous
The thing no one will ever tell you about falling in love is that you’re not just floating in the air forever. Eventually, you will hit the ground, where nothing is there to break your fall. Just you, a shattered heart, and a few best friends to buy you green tea shots and sit with you while you just can’t stop talking about the breakup. I moved to New York City precisely two weeks and two days ago, right after my body could float no longer. Just like a gunshot to the heart, I plummeted to the ground and woke up with tears in my eyes at my best friend's Upper west side apartment.
It’s bad luck to make a toast with no eye contact, come across a face-side-down penny, or drive by an all-black cat. It is karma to lose a potential lifetime because of an impulsive thrill, a meaningless figment of your worst intentions. A lifetime of what could-have-beens are all that will haunt you now. Every single promise and idea of what your life was going to be, turns into what your life could have been, and to simply put it, what your life won’t be.
A camera roll can be the most heart-wrenching temptation. While at urgent care trying to take a rapid COVID test, my insurance card cursed me by being at the top of my favorites folder containing 279 photos. I closed my eyes and started scrolling, but I opened them too soon. There he was.
As I begin to publish the love stories section for our Valentine’s day theme, I question my own. What love story do I have to write now? The one I worked on for four years slipped right out of my hands, and I can’t find it anymore no matter how hard I search.
I sat in my younger sister's apartment, and I waited on my phone anxiously for two answers. One answer from my dream graduate school and one answer from the love that slipped out of my hands. The silver lining was that I did get in the school, but the other answer didn’t cause for any celebrating. As my friends flooded me with “congratulations” and my younger sister screamed so loudly that my ear almost burst, all I could do was think about the what could-have-beens.
I never expected to be writing this sad little story on a Monday night. I had all of these false expectations and lived in a dream that I never anticipated waking up from. When I woke up, he was gone. I was left without everything I had ever known. Every laugh, every piece of advice, every tear shed, every memory, and every slice of encouragement. Walks, dinners, vacations, and everything else you can fit into four years, and some change, were all gone faster than the way I initially fell. Everyone said it was too soon, and maybe it was too good to be true.
Letting go is not easy. Whoever told you it would make you feel like this empowered single woman was just trying to make you feel better. I’m not going to sugarcoat it; lost love is the worst feeling humanly possible. I’d give my pinky toe never to have to feel this type of emotion again. If you think your love is ready to leave you, be proud. It takes a lot to step away from something that means the world to you, even if you regret it more than anything in your life afterward.
Sometimes it’s the memories that ruin a relationship; The “what used-to-be’s” rather than the “what could-have-beens”…the nostalgia of a past that isn’t the present and won’t be the future. Suppose you can’t get over the fact that relationships inevitably will change, and the honeymoon phase ends. In that case, you might end up in the exact same position I'm in. I advise you to do what I wish I had, and that is to appreciate that love becomes a beautiful partnership rather than this younger and more thrilling relationship. That’s where I find myself. All I have is a camera roll of every memory imaginable, and an empty heart that I worry may never find that same first true love and connection.
