Honestly, breaking up in the era of Social Distancing has been weirdly easy. You break up, leave, and literally can’t go back. Ha! What a troll. It also helps when you break up with a kind, capable human who respects the process.

But who cares about the reality of the situation! This blog is about the memory, looking back. My take. And it’s frankly been tricky! Who wants to hear about all the fights and therapy and drama and infractions? Ugh so boring. But apparently I need to process, to have a takeaway, learn a lesson, feel the feelings if this break up is going to canonized in the archives of my personal history. Which is the ultimate goal of break ups.

So I have been thinking about it. Meditating even. It really started when I was all sleepy high on ZZZZZZQuil and re-read T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.” I whipped myself up into a frenzy about the Multifoliate Rose and wrote the following incomprehensible line:

I had assumed he was uninterested in exploring the unfurled potential of my infinite petals. I was wrong.  For him, they simply were not there.

Then I waxed poetic about multiple undulating realities simmering underneath my surfaces. Yikes.

My weird sleep drunk—albeit a huge drama queen—had uncovered the primary issue: the current reality of our life was the only discernible future that existed to him. Waking up in our beloved rented Ocean Beach 2 bedroom, grinding coffee beans, me resentfully slamming the toilet seat down. Watering plants, watching HBO, wiping down the coffee table, sprinting out of the bed so I didn’t have to make it. Sunset beach walks, $5 happy hour margaritas, holding hands, matching mumus, laughing about work.

The banality of domestic partnership was a comforting, hypnotic Bossanova beat that filled my ears and heart with just enough oxygen to keep treading water. We paid our rent, went on dates, and didn’t talk about babies because it made him nervous and I gave up therapy in 2020.

The cracks were highly visible, but the music was louder. Think any song during a Nancy Meyers montage. One does not panic when “The Girl from Ipanema” fills the room with her soothing tones. Are you kidding?! Absolutely zero panic. You pour yourself a icy cold glass of pale pink Whispering Angel, don a white cashmere turtleneck, and stare wistfully at the ocean. Smug, shivering, unchanged, but decently satisfied.

So that’s how it played out for me for a while. I just didn’t hear the beat of my own desires anymore; I tuned that bitch out. Instead, I’d put on white silk, chug Sauvignon Blanc, listen to Seu Jorge croon and poach an egg or something.

And you know what? It was pretty freaking great. Fabulous even.

However, unlike the crescendo of a Nancy Meyers film, my inner voice was violently awoken by a series of intense, staccato events. Basically I ripped off the cashmere, smashed the wine glass against the wall, smeared yolk all over my face, beat my chest and screamed into the void “I want more!!!!!!!”

He listened. He was raised well. And that was that.

People have been checking in on me, but there’s not a lot to report. The majestic irony of a global pandemic is I have literally seen like 3 people, so there’s not a lot of faces I have to explain my new status to.

Well there is one face. Really just one. Me. I have had to explain this break up to myself over and over. And, I think I fully get her now. It was the best decision she could have made.