BREAKUP SUMMER
STIMULANT WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 017 // OCTOBER 5, 2024
So summer is over and everyone is broken up. This is both a blessing and a curse.
I say blessing because personally, I think it’s important to be alone for a while. When you’re single, you can have a proper phase of selfish melancholy, where you do exactly what you want and see how that works out for you (results may vary). Concession and sacrifice are important values, but can wait to be cultivated later. In transitional moments, being single leaves you wonderfully untethered from compromise.
But breakup summer is sad too, because this mutual state of freshly over-ness makes every conversation weirdly tender. Attempts to catch up can devolve into a hard swallow and wet eyes before you know it. It can be impossible to speak neutrally about pain, even if you’re at a party.
I don’t know about you, but I’m twenty-one and on the cusp of major change again. All of my decisions have started to take on a new weight, assume an air of finality. There’s always the question of how you want to spend your time in frighteningly limited phases of your life, deciding which relationships and clubs and pursuits are most important—whether you will try to forge new connections in the eleventh hour or stay at home with all the good you’ve found already. What you plan to take with you and what you will leave behind.
Except I never know what to leave behind.
So I’m on the phone with my ex-boyfriend and I’m saying Maybe we should give it three weeks. Maybe we should wait and see what it’s really going to be like for us this year before we decide if we want to try to make it work long-distance. I’m sitting on my bed atop dirty sheets and I’m biting my cuticles, trying not to let the gnawing garble up my words. He’s on the other end in the suburbs, looking over the green lawns, and he’s sighing as the wind blows over the grass. I can’t see him but I know he’s shaking his head, and I feel the No before it hits the handset or the telephone wires or the speaker pressed to my ear. He says I don’t want to ruin this by dragging it out too long. We’ve already gotten more good than we deserve. Let’s not ruin it. Let’s let this be a perfect part of our past.
Okay, so it’s over. The time has come and gone, the window opened and closed. It will never be the same again, not if I cry or stomp my feet or spend my nights reliving the particular way we fell in love. Not if I wear the pomegranate perfume he liked or buy the spicy hummus we used to eat together, not if I knock three times on the glass door of his old apartment. Not if I reanimate the whole thing in writing until I can almost feel every detail. Not even if I wait and it’s September again and everything is possible. Nothing I can do will make things the way they were again. Okay. Big fucking deal.
I have a terrible problem of wanting to keep good things until they go bad so I don’t feel sad when I eventually must get rid of them. If you ever get to look inside my fridge, this tendency will become materially evident.
Imagine there’s a nectarine in the crisper drawer and it’s getting weirdly soft and spotty on one side—mostly unappetizing, but not yet rotten through. What would you do?
Will you throw out the half-good thing before it's fully past its prime and then hear it hit the bottom of your trash can, imagining what you could’ve made with it if you only cared to try? Do you know enough about yourself to realize that once the rot begins you will never reach for that fruit, even if it looked splendid in the produce aisle, even if you had dreams that it would one day become a crumble once you put in the effort? Or do you wait and let the days pass until a green film develops over the brownish indentation on its side, and then when you chuck it, you feel good about yourself for eliminating this budding toxin from your environment, for being smart enough to protect yourself from decay when the moment came?
If you haven’t already guessed, I fall into the latter half. I cut off the weird hard rind that forms on blocks of cheddar. I let spinach sit until it’s mush. I’ve always felt like everyone else had a built in radar for when things had gone past their prime and weren’t worth the effort anymore. Not me.
You can imagine that when it comes to relationships, it’s very hard for me to accept that things have run their course when there’s been no rot yet, no fight or betrayal, no slow creep of disinterest or disgust. Often, even if something has turned bad, I feel like this is just the precursor to some grand reconciliation, which will come in a flood of tears and recovered understanding, which will make the whole thing an incredible lesson on the redemptive power of patience and love and how it can pay off to “do the hard work” with someone else. One day the nectarine and I will gaze lovingly at each other and proclaim how glad we are that I never gave up and made jam with it instead.
I can’t help but feel that if I throw in the towel, maybe I am doing the whole thing preemptively, imagining some future pain, inventing some obstacle that may never come to pass. Maybe I’m making too much of a small flaw, blowing it out of proportion, creating the problem in the first place by asking too often if everything is alright. I’m acutely aware of how wrongly I can see a relationship, so I figure the safest option is to just hold on.
This worldview has been disproven many times. Over the summer, I was talking to my mother about a falling out I’d had with a friend. I told her that I kept trying, making opportunities for him to make things right between us, to work it out. I kept trying and I kept being disappointed. I told her that I couldn’t just leave it alone because we had once been so close—this was just an ebb and I was waiting for the flow. Isn’t that what friendship was all about? Through thick and thin? Surely this was just the thin.
As I described to her all the good memories we had shared, she stopped me. She said But this all happened a long time ago. When was the last time it was actually good? Not in a year, at least.
She said So it hasn’t been the way you’re describing in a long, long time. The relationship you’re mourning, what you’re trying to revive, does not exist anymore.
Okay, so I’m not keeping the dream alive or waiting patiently for my grand romantic Notebook moment. I’m watering a dead houseplant until the windowsill floods. I’m digging up the urn in the backyard and waltzing it around the living room as the neighbours watch in horror.
My mother reminded me that you cannot reanimate something that has gone by sheer force of will, and you certainly can’t build love back alone. I was so busy thinking of how things used to be that I didn’t realize I was speaking in past tense. This wasn’t an ongoing relationship but my own far-off rosy memories. Hope is one thing—this was more like delusion, wishful thinking that nothing was so gone it couldn’t be brought back by my own tireless efforts.
When you let someone leave, you’re not giving up on real potential—you’re giving up on the hope that the potential you’re imagining would appear. I was wishing that my friend would wake up one day actually wanting to do the things I was begging for. The pain wasn’t from missing his company, it was watching the possibility of repair become slimmer as he rejected every opportunity. And here’s why there’s no such thing as “right person, wrong time,” because the right person would want to be with you now. Sure, there is no world without compromise, but in order to “work things out,” everyone has to be on board.
And, even more unfortunately, there are a whole host of perfectly good reasons to not want to work it out. Before we broke up, my ex used to say all the time This is a very particular point in our lives. After I move, I will be a different person, with a different life and different priorities. This perfect bubble is not our real life, or at least it won’t be very soon.
At first, this frustrated me—I felt like he was preempting a change before even knowing what that would be like when it came. Maybe everything would be more the same than we expected. How could he know?
But eventually, I thought to myself Thank God someone understands how the world works. That somebody I love can know this fact and tell it to me so plainly. Maybe it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I felt like his ability to be realistic about the inevitable shift that awaited us, especially when I could not yet, was an incredible mercy. Even if we were to hold on, the thing itself would change in our hands as we clutched it.
And I also came to realize that he wanted to change. He knew that resisting the shift, holding onto scraps of the past instead of walking fully and unencumbered into the future, would ruin both at once. If you refuse to let go, you can resent the past for transforming in time. You can resent the future for not resembling your favourite piece of history. Jesus Christ. How lucky to understand that. How lucky that he told me.
He helped me to understand that sometimes the best way to enjoy the past is to leave it the hell alone. Of course I wish that everything good could last forever, but this is not how the world works. It is easiest to let go of people when you’re angry and sad, apathetic or itching to get out already, but there’s something to be said about leaving things on a higher note, about not forcing some grand, acrimonious conclusion. In her endless wisdom, my mother tells me Let them. Stay or leave, change or hold on—let people make their choices, and believe them when they show you how they want your relationship to go.
There is a world in which you realize that sad things happen for good reasons all the fucking time. One where you realize that nothing lasts forever and this can be a comfort, if you only let it. One where the space left by everything you abandon makes room for everything still un-rotten. One where you don’t force things to stick around, but can be pleasantly surprised if they come back. And—there’s a world where not forcing things when they aren’t right is the very thing that allows them back someday.
And maybe, maybe, seeing everything as finite could let you love it more while you have the chance. Eat the fruit in its prime. Enjoy with abandon, with no reservations, with no opt-out clauses or concern for future consequences. Without needing it to be that way forever.
Maybe then you can dive in all the way, and one day look back fondly with no regrets. Maybe, then, it can be a perfect part of your past.
Marina Abramovic on her performance with partner Ulay, photographed here: "In Rest Energy we actually hold one arrow on the weight of our body and arrow is pointing my heart. We have two small, little microphones on our hearts where we can hear the sounds of the heart beating. As our performance is progressing heart beats become more and more intense and it's just four minutes and ten seconds, for me it was, I tell you it was forever."
BREAKUP SUMMER was edited by Kat Mulligan.
maxwell norman’s album of the week
Cocteau Twins - Victorialand (1986)
The honorable most high royalty of both Scotland and dream pop have banger album after banger album for the ethereal chill of October’s beginning. This year I’ve been drawn to Victorialand, recorded with essentially no drums, just guitar, effects, and one of the world’s greatest singers in Elisabeth Fraser—even by Cocteau Twins standards, this one hangs like shimmering sheets of gossamer between your ears. The operatic choirs formed by Fraser’s fucking insane voice shine most on songs like “Whales Tails” and “How to Bring a Blush to the Snow”. It’s pop music refracted through amber and honey. For neon-drenched nights on the city streets or watching sunrise over untouched forest, it’s hard to beat Cocteau Twins’ masterpiece of a career, of which Victorialand stands as an under appreciated piece.
get hip
“kaka”, a solo exhibition by Tomas Dessureault opens at WIP on October 10th. It’s free.
Mark your calendars for October 20th. Stimulant reading.
Encore Poetry Project launch their second issue at Cardinal Tea Room on October 10th.
Soliloquies at Concordia will be accepting prose and poetry submissions until tomorrow.