A friend came to me with his broken heart clenched between his fingers and I shook my head to say, “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you now.” It was selfish, and at night sometimes I feel sick about it, but I’ve learned that sometimes it’s okay to be selfish for a little while if your heart requires it of you. I needed my sewing kit for myself; the spool of thread I prepared between my fingers was short and I didn’t have any extra needles to spare. I worry sometimes if he forgives me for tending to my own wounds instead of his, but I won’t be able to properly take care of anyone else until I learn how to properly take care of myself.
He had walked in on her in the apartment they shared with someone else’s hand up her skirt. He packed his things and took the next flight back to the Midwest. “I almost wish I had walked in on them fucking,” he wrote to me. “Anything would’ve been better than the image of that asshole just TAKING her.”
I’ve never been cheated on and I’ve never truly been close to death but I imagine they both feel the same.
“She was just as complicit as he was,” I responded. I couldn’t stop myself from hating her just a little bit.
After a week he was back in New York and they were together again. He wrote, “She explained to me that she was in a manic phase.”
“Oh,” I replied. From 20 blocks south he couldn’t see the way my hair moved when I disapprovingly shook my head.
His excuses filtered through the screen with more desperation. “Besides, we love each other. We were miserable alone. And it’s not like I would ever meet another girl regardless. I wanted to die without her.”
I am reminded of a conversation I had with my mother in the immediate aftermath of my own breakup. I asked if she had ever heard of Plato’s theory of love, that in the beginning, men and women were born as one sentient being, but eventually they were split down the middle. Now, people run around constantly searching for their other halves, aching to feel whole again.
“He and I, we were a team. Now I feel like I’ve been halved,” I sobbed to her.
“Well,” she sighed, “Plato was an idiot.”
My friend took her back because he had to, because his world primly divides itself into two empirical spheres: either he is with her, or he is alone. He’s been beaten up by life for too long to believe in other options.
“It’s not healthy to derive all of your happiness from another person,” I told him.
“I know,” he responded, “but it’s all I have.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about romantic destiny lately, and it’s probably because I’m reading On Love by Alain de Button. “We invent a destiny to spare ourselves the anxiety that would arise from acknowledging that the little sense there is in our lives is merely created by ourselves,” he writes.
I’m a fatalist in a lot of ways. I see the glass half-empty and I don’t believe in god. My parents divorced when I was 14 years old. But in me there is something like a glowworm lit and wriggling; it’s the endlessly comforting notion that though I am alone now, I won’t be alone forever. This is the kind of naive sentiment that de Botton believes we invent to bring structure to our otherwise chaotic lives. It lets us put to rest fears that would otherwise derail us from existing the way we should. If I don’t believe in god but I believe in romantic destiny, then I must be afraid of living alone even more than I am of dying.
I think that my friend is, too.
“I don’t understand how you could sleep with her after that,” I wrote to him.
He was indignant.
“You don’t understand,” he replied. “You have every option open to you. For me, she’s all I have.”
I open up On Love to the seventh page and I read, “My mistake was to confuse a destiny to love with a destiny to love a given person.”
Destined to love, I let the glowworm burrow into me.
“I love her so much,” my friend says. “Watching her listen to music today I couldn’t help but cry.”
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Brilliant…