I hope that reading my writing makes you feel like I've just given you a hug. If it doesn't, e-mail me, and I'll have to give you one in person.

Please feel free to skip this if you (understandably) don’t give a shit about my life and you just want to watch YouTube videos or read about journalism or somethin’. I don’t really want to make a Heartbreak Soup #2, so you’ll have to bear with me while I work this stuff out.
While I adored the book, I thought LOTR director Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lovely Bones skewed too far cheap thriller for me to actually ever pay to see. Unfortunately the trailer appeared before every movie I went to see last semester, as well as every episode of “The Real World: DC” that I consumed. There was always one quote that kind of got to me, despite my general abhorrence for the film itself. While trying to parse the line between life and death, Susie Salmon’s younger brother points to a cerulean space drawn between the earth and the sky and says, “Susie’s in the in-between!”

For the last 10 days, I myself have been living in the in-between, teetering somewhere between life and death. During the days, I force myself to live. This takes a lot of effort, because at night I basically allow myself to die. In the mornings I wake up and drink coffee, I go to work and answer e-mails and do homework and take the subway. Sometimes I even eat. At night, I lie in the dark and I cry until I’m exhausted. I will time to move faster, but then realize that it doesn’t matter—when I wake up the next day I will feel the exact same way: empty.

I am alone again.

For the last ten days I stirred in my sleep and woke up thinking he was next to me. I had vivid dreams where he came back, where everything was as it was the day we first said “I love you” in the part of the West Village where the avenues make a triangle. We had spent the morning at the Cloisters, and I knew if I didn’t let myself finally say it that day, I would never say it. My fingernails were dirty from digging sparkly rocks up from the grass by the Hudson. I was wearing a floral dress from Anthropologie with a scalloped silk lining. It was the first day of Spring.

The last ten days have been the most hollow I’ve ever experienced. As a writer once said on This Recording, “There are people from whom we do not recover, experiences into which we try to fold all others, places we do not leave.” This person, this experience, this place is one of those, an invisible tattoo, an imprint on the skin. There are phrases he said last week that I will never forget: “We need to talk,” “I’m in love with someone else,” “I love you, it’s just… I love her more.” If I don’t try consciously to block them out, my OCD digs in and I am stuck listening to them on repeat, over and over again, unable to disengage and rejoin the land of the living.

Existing in the in-between, I convinced myself that he would come back and realize what a terrible mistake he had made. I made small, necessary steps towards recovery: hiding him on Gchat, not speaking to him for an entire week, entertaining myself with friends. But still I was living in a self-constructed purgatory. The idea that he might come back was the only thing driving me from getting out of bed every morning, but it was also what was making me cry myself to sleep every night. I had let go physically and even on the internet!–but I couldn’t bring myself to let go emotionally.

Last night I hit rock bottom and this morning when I woke up I knew something had to change. I couldn’t just be passive and let his confusion torment me. As much as I feared the outcome, and as much as it hurt, I knew I had to give an ultimatum.

Ultimatums are for people who are strong enough to stick to whatever outcome the ultimatum dictates. Until now, I’ve never been strong enough to actually give one before. I let things get messy, and stay messy, and before you know it it’s six months after the break up and we’re still kind of hanging out and we’re still sometimes sleeping together but we’re also seeing other people, and feelings get hurt and meanings get confused and you start to forget why you ever broke up with the person in the first place: all you remember is their goodness, their light, and soon you’re convinced they’ll come back to you. That’s what it means to be in the in-between. The in-between fucking sucks.

Perhaps because I’m ‘older’ or ‘wiser’ or just less patient, this time it didn’t take me months or years to decide I couldn’t do it. It took me 10 days. I couldn’t live in that cerulean ribbon between sky and land anymore. Things had to either be as they were before Thursday April 1st (though they could never be truly as they were ever again), or it had to be Over (capital O). He had to choose her, or choose me, but I wasn’t going to wait for him to decide. I owed it to myself to admit that his indecision hurt just as much as it did when he chose her, but at least when he made that decision—which he did, and I could practically feel his stubborn heart’s heaviness pressing through the keyboard—I was finally free.

Speaking as someone who has an almost chronic obsession with not making the right choice, I can honestly say that I know now why people feel so smug when they manage to do it. It just feels good to do right by yourself, even if it also feels painful and depressing and lonely. I’m going to be very sad for awhile, but knowing that it can’t get any worse from here already makes me feel lighter. Perhaps “unbearably light” as Kundera might say, but anything is better than the heaviness I’ve been carrying around in my chest all week.

I would never have made the decision to completely end it last year. I am quite good at letting the break up last even longer than the relationship did. I probably wouldn’t have even made this decision a few months ago. But today, I am one of those people who gave an ultimatum. I am one of those people who is strong enough to act instead of stay suspended in the in-between. I’m still sad, and I will probably still cry myself to sleep tonight and wake up feeling like crap tomorrow morning. But now I can delete the five drafts of posts I wrote while living in the in-between but couldn’t bring myself to run. I didn’t want him to read them and know how much this all had really impacted me. Now instead of fearing his reaction, or waiting for his decision, I can focus on the upwardness, the light. I’m no longer in the in-between, and there are no reasons emotionally or physically enticing me to sway from my decision. I can post this!—and I can move on.

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