25. The business of making meaning

After breaking up with your boyfriend, your city, your life

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In my last semester of college, I had a whirlwind relationship with someone I was convinced I’d marry. We’d been a little bit in love with each other from afar for a while, and then, after a screening of Call Me By Your Name at Bow Tie Criterion Cinema, all of a sudden we were very in love from very close. 

I was two grades ahead of him, and my graduation loomed over our relationship. He stuck around for the graduation festivities, sat with my parents at commencement, came to all the parties. On my last night on campus, the remaining undergrads gathered under a graduation tent in the largest quad—Tent Party, it was called. Everyone schlepped over their leftover liquor and we had one final debaucherous night before we were kicked out of the dorms at 12pm the next day. 

He came with me to the Tent Party, and a friend snapped several pictures of the two of us, then let me look over her shoulder as she clicked through the frames on her digital camera. When I saw those photos, my first thought was that I would tell our future kids that this is what their parents looked like in college. Young, blissed out, and unburdened. I looked radiant. It is rare that a photo says it all, but I think those ones really did.

For a few months, we pretended I wasn’t leaving. I stayed in New Haven for the summer after graduating, subleasing a room under the table while I worked in the Marsh Botanical Gardens and looked for a more permanent job. 

I loved that summer. Those extra months arrived as a gift. Each morning I walked to the gardens at 8am to shovel dirt, pull weeds, edge trees, scrub tea plants of pests. My world was lush and fecund—I held fruit in my palms, moved earth between my fingers. I could see all the work I was doing, a welcome change from the thinking I’d done for the last four years, which yielded nothing tangible, and which I was only beginning to understand did not make me qualified to take on the real world. But I wasn’t living in the real world. I loved New Haven too much, loved this person too much to imagine ever leaving for anything else. 

We each had more living to do though, and once I got a job in Boston, he didn’t think we could be fully present in our lives if our relationship spanned two cities. The day before I moved to Boston, he drove me to board the Vermonter after we’d spent a weekend with his family on Lake Champlain. On the way, he nearly ran a red light—this even, grounded person—and I knew what was coming. As we pulled into the Essex Junction train station, he broke up with me. I wept the whole seven hours back to New Haven, then drove to Boston the next morning to start my new life. 

What has always felt acutely sad about a breakup is that it represents the dissolution of a world I’ve created with others. All the inside jokes and references, recurring characters, patterns of life, ways of moving around each other, ways of moving against each other—they all lose their internal meaning. 

I’m left with the image of a sugar cube dissolving in a cup of hot water. The crystalline structure breaks apart, and while each molecule still exists (nothing has actually been destroyed), the whole becomes invisible. Each isolated piece floats senselessly, suspended in solution.

That breakup was especially painful because it represented the end of my relationship with this specific person, as well as the end of my relationship with New Haven. He’d been my last tether. I’d wanted so badly to leave Indiana for college, to feel like I was striking out on my own to build a new life (a partial illusion of course, as I was still financially dependent on my parents, in addition to needing their support in countless other ways). Still, if not entirely on my own, I did build that world, and after commencement I watched it fracture into pieces that were moving to New York, San Francisco, Boston, DC, Philly, and all the places that often go unacknowledged in the accountings of dispersed graduates. Everything we’d collectively created in New Haven and believed to be ours—a front stoop on Lake Place, a shortcut, the top floor of the stacks—would become someone else’s. In order to move forward, we had to relinquish everything we’d claimed. 

For someone like me in the business of making meaning, I can’t stand the thought that the meaning of a place is lost, painted over by the next inhabitants. The way I’m so attached to the early morning meeting spot of a mosaiced telephone pole at the corner of Hampshire and Windsor, while to most people, it’s just the juncture of two potholed roads. When I’m not present to hold the significance of that street corner in the space between my floating ribs, the significance doesn’t exist. 

On leaving a city or a relationship, there is a person-shaped void left behind. But cities and people are dynamic and resilient; the hole is filled in a relatively short time, at least provisionally. There’s the physical filling, another group of people moving into my old apartment or into my spot next to a person I loved, but the emotional filling follows close behind: my absence is bandaged by the shuffling and resettling of a web of people who now play a bigger role in each other’s lives or have stronger ties than they did before. 

I can be a little precious about all of this, mentally wringing my life of meaning and collecting it in a teacup. But that awareness doesn’t change that I feel that same ache of grief as I’m preparing to leave Boston. It’s the feeling that perhaps I am disposable, that we all are. Yes, people are missed, but in time they are missed less. The intensity of emotion fades as the world reshuffles to fill in the loss. 

Several people have said to me, “Boston will always be here!” which is supposed to be comforting, but I want to scream, “It won’t be the same Boston!” I want my city back, but in its present configuration, an obvious impossibility, since, by the time I’ve finished writing this sentence, the city has already changed. That’s the dynamic beauty of life. Attempting to embalm my own history does not actually preserve emotional significance, nor is meaning lost just because the world changes. In fact, it is the process of change itself that forces me to grapple with this nostalgia for a past that is no longer mine, if it ever was. 

I often think that I’ve never had a partner as well-matched for me as the man I dated in my last semester of college. With him, I was so unguarded in the way I loved. I’d lost my husk to the world. So although the breakup tore me open, upon moving, my new life rushed into the vacuum, displacing some of the hurt, some of the emptiness, and eventually, enveloping me fully into a new life in a new city. 

I reconnected with him last winter. He was in Boston for a day after Thanksgiving, and we got a drink, slipping into familiar conversation I’d been skeptical we’d find again. We got a second drink and I felt an expansion beneath my ribs, the sense that we were still part of something, that all the embodied meaning I thought had been lost when we broke up could recrystallize in the right conditions. After more than two hours of talking, we walked out into a November night spitting rain on our hoodless heads. He held me against his body for two blocks, then we parted, our beds and lives in opposite directions. 

I was left again with a person-shaped void. But I also carried the understanding that it could be filled again, even if not by him. It sounds so twee. But it’s what I’m holding onto as I arrange my plans to move across the country and start again. As I move away from nearly everyone I’ve ever loved in an adult capacity. There is loss in leaving a place where growth and hurt and healing have taken place. But Boston will readily fill the space I leave behind, and as for the space left in me, I’ll have to wait to see what rushes in.

Fortnightly Faves

1. This chilling piece of cultural commentary by Elizabeth Bruenig on America’s culture of death.

2. This Leslie Jamison essay from 2019 on the birth of her daughter and the birth of herself as a mother, in conversation with her history of an eating disorder. After reading Jamison’s recent piece in Astra on daydreams, I’ve been reading a ton of her essays and I’m just blown away.

3. A self promo for an essay I wrote on ED recovery (and the nostalgia for sicker days) for Julie Gallagher’s newsletter weightless. I’d be honored if you read it, and please do check out Julie’s newsletter. It’s full of honest essays and interviews (like this one with Jessica DeFino) that have stayed with me.

4. This interview with Caren Beilin on writing and the function of fiction. In particular, this answer to the question of why she writes:

   I think it’s about friendship, connection, affinity. And really, to be blatant, it’s anti-suicide. When I read Violette Leduc—when I read her brazen brain full of beaks and throbbing birds, of paradise, when she grinds her elbow into her writing desk, and cycles through worship and renunciation like a demon—I know that it is okay for me to exist. And when a writer friend asks after my work, or shares their work with me, or when they literally shelter me for months or years, I have a place on this earth. Language—pursuing it—can give you a life.

5. This extremely wholesome thread of songs people sing to their dogs.

   Emma Bolden @emmabo

   i wish every pet owner would release an album of songs they make up for their pets

6. This episode of Longform with Sam Knight (who is punctual, which we learn right off the bat, and is a quality that matters a little too much to me). I love hearing about a writer’s process, and I found Knight’s process (as well as his subject matter—re: his recent book The Premonitions Bureau) particularly interesting.

7. This episode of This American Life. The last act fully SENT ME. Maybe it’s just because I have a similarly mortifying blood story, though the police were not involved. Regardless, if you need something uplifting and hilarious in this moment, I recommend a listen.