When the moment happens, when the fracture inevitably occurs, you might feel as though you’ve been immersed in deep water for a long time, slowly running out of air, and now you really, definitely can’t breathe at all anymore. You will be scared. Naturally, you will want to go to the person—previously known as “your person”—for comfort. This is a bad idea. You might even still be living in the same house and sharing the same bed at this time. It is a bad idea to continue this. Stop saying those little habitual endearments as soon as you possibly can. If the space-sharing is unavoidable, you need to build the strongest wall around your head and heart that you ever have, and preciously guard whatever is most you about you. It will be confusing trying to decide what’s you alone and what’s you together, especially at first. Don’t worry about that right now. Instead, separate all of your physical things from theirs, avoid their routines, wean yourself off of their attention as best you can.
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At first, try not to be alone at all; you’ll need to lean heavily on your friends. Hopefully, you’ll have some that don’t know the person, but you might not. This will make things more complicated. Don’t, for example, find yourself—as a result of shared friendships—in a long and heartfelt and drunken conversation with the person around a beach bonfire when it’s only been a couple of weeks and you’re both still picking bone chips out of the soft tissue of your feelings. Whatever you do, don’t invite the familiar pressure of their hand on the small of your back as you walk away from the dark ocean. This will not end well for you. The next afternoon, in the fog of your hangover, you might mourn the ways you two were wrong for each other more than you regret bringing this person back to your bed.
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You will, of course, want to talk to all your friends about the big, gross feeling that’s swollen with rot, touching all your other thoughts and festering in your chest. Your friends will not want to talk about that, or if they do, it’ll be with a measure of thirsty curiosity and the kind of pity one might reserve for a wounded animal, or an unpopular child. That doesn’t help, but self-pity has a syrupy sweetness to it, and nobody can blame you for indulging until it makes your stomach hurt at least once, maybe even a few times. But you need to grow up and learn your lesson before you make it everyone else’s problem or the only thing that’s ever going on with you, because that’s just no fun at all.
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Get your motorcycle license. You’ve always wanted to, ever since you were a little kid, and now you have time because you’re not busy with the person anymore. Plus, you might be overflowing with manic energy at this point. Get a motorcycle to go with it, probably secondhand, because this is just a phase and you know it. Right now, you should be pursuing something that feels sexy and wild, because you just turned 20 and you’re tan and single and alive on the California coast for the summer, as the case may be. Ride your motorcycle down the Pacific Coast Highway. Pull over and take off your helmet, let the ocean wind tangle your hair, let yourself smile for real in the glittering June sun. You’re life’s protagonist, babe—act like it!
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Download a dating app for the first time. This is a perilous thing to be doing, yes. Your motivations in that weird new world might not be clear to yourself just yet, and you might make some uncomfortable choices—choices with great potential to put you in harm’s way. I hope you get lucky (euphemistically, sure, but mostly earnestly, emotionally lucky) with those first few mistakes. You deserve enjoyment, or at least distraction, not regret and shame. It’s great to feel so wanted, though, and great to be experiencing new people. Explore as safely and as joyfully as you can. Go to a party where you only know the friend you came with, drink cheap white wine out of a chipped mug on someone’s roof, and see where the night takes you.
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Find time to be in your brain, but with a buffer. Important meditations might be happening for you, and you should figure out a way to nurture them without letting yourself wallow. Take up a hobby—or, better, a minimum-wage job—doing something repetitive but not unpleasant. The recommended course of action is landing a part-time gig at the local native-plant nursery, where a work day consists of seven hours of watering, weeding, pruning, shoveling soil, and planting seedlings, preferably done while listening to music or a podcast. This is the optimal environment for productive rumination. The bonus of this is that sometime in the future, you can come back and visit, and see how much all those plants that you potted as inch-tall sprouts have grown, and you can think something cliché and cosmically positive about their undeniable parallel to you.
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Move away from wherever the memories live, at least for a while. If you do come back there, wash your pillowcases immediately, or else you might cry when you find out they still smell like woodsmoke from the night of that ill-fated bonfire. Go and live with other people your age, ideally somewhere perennially sunny and culturally awake. Just for example, if your childhood friend has to sublet her room (with a big window and a loft bed) in a co-op house in Berkeley, move in for the rest of the summer, with your new-used motorcycle and some art supplies and your favorite jeans and not much else. Run on the forest trails every day, longer and longer, with bright eyes and a clear mind. Spend afternoons napping in the hammock on the porch, and make new friends who invite you camping on short notice. Go camping! Wake up with a cold nose and the fresh world’s wide-open sky pale blue above you. Visit the used bookstore on Sundays and leaf through thin volumes of eccentric and unpretentious, un-famous poetry, whatever catches your fancy. Go to thrift shops (trendy or not) and buy all new clothes, clothes with no memories attached to them, clothes that suit your reborn self.
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Make some more mistakes, hopefully fun mistakes, in frat house coat closets and apartments you’ll never see in the daylight. Write about all of it, by hand in your favorite journal, under July’s golden afternoons. Stay busy! Ask your housemate to teach you how to make vegan espresso fudge. Write a phrase that makes you happy on the wall of your room with colorful pens. Go sit on the rickety fire escape with your friend while she clumsily rolls her own cigarettes and smokes them; these twilit conversations will bring you closer. Take your motorcycle up to a viewpoint to read the poetry, visit a boy you’ve been seeing casually (in the middle of the day, in his clean apartment with the courtyard view), then go back to the house and eat tofu curry, perched on the kitchen counter with your happy, loud companions.
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When, eventually, you have no going-out plans on a weekend night, try not to spiral. Try not to have one of those nights where you write feverishly and self-deprecatingly until you fall asleep on your tear-wet pillowcase. Instead, go for a walk, alone, in the fading dusk. Go back to your room and get super high, take out your paints, listen to the Pixies until you forget what it feels like to be a person, and then climb that creaky wooden ladder up to your bed and go to sleep. This may be a form of spiraling, but when you wake up the next day, you should feel as though you’ve shaken something loose in your heart. This is likely for the best.
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Allow yourself to feel something real for someone. She’s not just another name on the Tinder slot-machine, not anymore. There’s something so enchanting, so compelling about her. She’s mercurial, but warm, and you want to be close to her; that’s okay. Hold her hand in the crowd at the back-alley indie concert she brought you to. Give her dried sprigs of lavender from your garden, so she can arrange them in the tiny frosted-glass bottle of the Absolut Citron shooter she saved from a previous night together. Don’t overpromise yourself, since you know you’re going east in a month, but enjoy every moment.
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Go east. Embrace the reset. Your mistakes and your explorations of what makes you you (and of what’s not you) all existed inside a bubble, a playground of minimal consequences. Understand that your wild and crazy summer was mostly dress-up. Use the new season of your life as an effective integration period of whatever you’ve discovered about yourself. Lean into your new reality, relearn who you’d like to be. The change might be hard. Try not to relapse into communication with the person, even though they do provide a sense of consistency to your life, and it is nice to have someone who really knows you. Someone who you can talk to before bed, even if they’re in another time zone because they dropped out of college and moved to Berlin after the breakup. If you need to distract yourself, be tactful, and step lightly with the people implicated in your distractions. Pour your energy into something rewarding, reconnect with friends you haven’t seen in a while. Bask in the fall colors—change can be so beautiful. It’s a cliché for a reason.
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When, inevitably, you find yourself caught up in something that’s blossomed into much more than a distraction, something with a bright warm solidity to it, something that makes you laugh and feel truly seen and appreciated for the first time in a while—don’t be so scared, so cynical. Don’t let yourself freeze up. Just fall. Yes, he will catch you. There can and will be new sacred memories, both here and in California. It might be nothing like you thought it would be, delightful in an unfamiliar way. You might feel a slight dissonance when you bring him to your parents’ house on the coast for the first time, but when you hear him thank your mom and you look up into those smiling blue eyes it’ll feel more right than you could have imagined. Now that you know you can be whole alone, after all the luck and all the learning, it’s that much sweeter.
Sole Magazine