Every heartbreak I’ve ever had happened the same. I say “every” like there’ve been a lot, but really, there’ve only ever been two. Both of them ending exactly the same—and not the normal, sitting-in-your-bed-crying-into-a-bowl-of-ice-cream-watching-Bridget-Jones’-Diary-until-you-suddenly-have-an-epiphany-and-remember-who-you-are kind of way. Both times the effects of the heartbreak were so viscerally distinct, so physically disruptive, that it cannot be sheer coincidence. It has to be me—this is my body’s physical reaction to heartbreak. My body rejects it the way a fourth grader with a nut allergy would reject a peanut butter sandwich.
The first time, I was in the tenth grade. I gave myself slack and chalked it all up to the difficult age that is sixteen. My mom had just passed. I had an eating disorder. It was one cup of teenage hormones mixed with a teaspoon of family drama. It was expected of me. Surely now, nearly a decade later, as a woman in her twenties, I wouldn’t have that same theatrical reaction. I’ve outgrown it the same way I outgrew my favourite oversized thrifted flannel I wore on my first date.
We went to the movies. His mom picked me up in her white BMW with the top down. She walked us into the theatre and sat three rows behind us. I remember feeling so embarrassed that I swore I would never see him again. Spoiler alert: I saw him again. I saw him after school waiting to walk me home from the bus stop. I saw him at his kitchen table every Thursday night for weekly family dinners. I saw him until I needed him so desperately that my body went into a state of physical decay when I finally stopped seeing him. Years later, I laughed with my friends about the holes I punched in the walls and the tears I spilled in the middle of parties after having fallen to my knees surrounded by my friends while they were surrounded by their boyfriends.
When it came time, nearly a decade later, to have my heart broken again, I assumed I was ready. I’d spent the last few years laughing off my friends’ breakups just as callously as they had laughed off that first boy that devastated me. Parts of me had hardened. Breakups were a necessity of life; one so common they didn’t deserve the attention I had allocated to mine in the past. But surprisingly to me, the second time heartbreak came for me I found myself just as uncontrollable and inconsolable as the first time. Like the moment you rediscover that once-loved and overworn flannel shirt in the back of your closet, shocked to see how perfectly it still fits.
The familiarity hit me the moment I found myself swapping out my work uniform for a thrifted Arnold Palmer sweater vest, touching up my lip liner, and wondering whether or not the night ahead was a first date or merely a friendly night out. We had spent time together outside of work before, but this time felt different. The air pressure changed each time we found ourselves in a room alone together. Ever since the night of the staff dinner, we couldn’t look each other in the eye anymore. We’d avoided each other for what felt like decades but what I believe was only two days until she finally worked up the courage stumbling over words:“Would you want to do something tomorrow night? I feel like we haven’t hung out in a while?”
At this moment I knew my reign of superiority over my friends had come to a close. I knew that all those days laughing at the Instagram photos of ex-boyfriends shown as battle scars had caught up to me. Karma had come for her day of reckoning. I was convinced that the days of big, oversized feelings were gone until I met her. The girl who would unexpectedly change almost everything about me. The girl who managed to turn this black cat into a golden retriever in a matter of months. My cousin, who’s fifteen years my senior, always told me that as you get older, life gets less and less exciting. At your office job, you start seeking the thrills of the crushes you had in high school. You convince yourself that the guy in the khakis who does accounting and doesn’t make eye contact with you probably smoked cigarettes in high school, and if you squint hard enough you can see it, and if you try hard enough, maybe you can muster up a crush out of thin air and find the will to put your cardigan on in the morning and go to work. So, when I finally found myself in another all-consuming-mind-bending-can’t-close-my-eyes-without-seeing-her-can’t-open-my-eyes-without-thinking-of-her kind of relationship, I convinced myself it was all casual.
Granted, I’d had casual relationships since that first heartbreak. I had crushes. I flirted in bars. I kissed in cars. In fact, I was a casual-relationship connoisseur. If you’d asked me at the time, I’d have said it wasn’t my fault. It was never my fault. It was bouts of bad luck. Seas filled with the wrong men. The Toronto dating scene. The paradox of choice. The body positivity movement. The mercury retrograde. There was always a reason. At every given moment in time, I simultaneously had both a fake crush and a reason why we could never be together, making it all the more romantic. The fake crush involved you, your friends, and a third-party stand-in just cute enough to fantasize about but uninteresting enough to truly care about. Despite the always-convincing-to-me-never-convincing-to-anyone-else excuses I gave, I was what you could call a Registered Self-Sabotager—purposely choosing those whom I deemed unattainable. Even the times I misjudged the situation and found myself at a crossroads with a real crush, I somehow managed to get away unscathed. I had a close call with The Artist when I was just barely twenty-one.
I seemed to be walking through life armed with one-liners and a slightly bruised ego, when he came along. Handsome enough to provide the right dose of confidence-boosting charms, but blissfully unaware of his own good looks. During a particularly slow period The Artist had invited us to whatever hot spot of the month we were into at the time. For whatever reason we all knew what that meant. Like two opposing magnets, we were always drawn to each other. When that tension finally manifested into a drunken late-night kiss, I looked up into his eyes for just a brief moment, with butterflies and tequila turning in my stomach until my eyes broke contact first, then my feet started running, and before I knew it, I was already telling my friends what happened. None of my friends could understand why I was standing outside the bar, cigarette in hand huddled beside them, and not back in that moment still standing there with him. It wasn’t until my friends asked me that question that I realized that was even an option.
I didn’t understand why either.
None of the casual encounters ever had that overpowering, intoxicating, life-derailing kind of pull on me. They were never enough to shake me out of whatever routine I had fallen into. So when we finally met—and she was still suffering from the lesions of her first heart-breaking, soul-crushing, life-ruining breakup and was too scared to let history repeat itself—I was the one that convinced her, along with myself, that whatever we were doing would never amount to anything substantial. It could never and would never elicit that same wound she found herself licking because she simply would never experience that kind of love again. This particular kind of cruel and unusual punishment could only flourish out of that blissfully ignorant, naive first love. Mature love was supposed to be dull. It was supposed to be simple. Boring. Mundane. Manageable. Tolerable.
She turned me into a pathological liar. From the moment we met, every word out of my mouth and every thought regarding her only fuelled my denial. When we first met, I never imagined we’d be friends, let alone whatever the word is for that explosive, destined-for-doom relationship we had. I had been working at community centers for what felt like an eternity. Throughout my entire university career, I would race across town, as my class finished —performing gender or sustainable staging— throw on that navy blue cotton t-shirt with “We’re Hiring” pasted across my back at the head of command in a room full of strangers putting on the performance of a lifetime. I treated this once thrilling, now mind-numbing part-time job of “recreation instructor” as a stage for my personal acting career; convincing classes of people that I was a highly skilled jack of all trades and hadn’t spent the past night Googling “how to do a somersault tutorial” into the early hours of the morning.
Every summer, that part-time job turned into a full-time contract working at the summer camps. Camp was this cult-like experience. Something about the environment created an intoxicating addiction—whether it was Stockholm syndrome from the sheer amount of time you were trapped in that building together, or heatstroke from the long days in the hot summer sun, I fell victim to it each and every summer. By my sixth cycle around the camp-shaped sun, I had already circled through working there alone, forcing my friends to work there with me, and by this particular summer—what would come to be my final summer—I was less than enthusiastic to be circling back to working without them. I planned to spend my days holed up in an office in the back, reading when I could, and passing the time without any eyes on me. It wasn’t until that first orientation that I realized that was the person I was going to be spending my summer with. Her hair was neatly trimmed down around the sides, her loose brown curls pushed back into a baby mullet, her Magen David hanging around her neck laying atop her oversized hand-cut muscle tank effortlessly tucked into one side of her five-inch inseam athletic shorts. I, in my white pleated tennis skirt, my long brown hair pulled back into two French braids, and my baby pink crew neck; I took one look at her and decided we would have nothing in common.
“How long have you been working here?” I asked while pushing some boxes aside and brushing the dust off the desk in our now-shared office.
I would lie to you and make up some answer in between, but truthfully, I wasn’t listening, and I learned my lesson about lying.
“Cool.”
Somewhere between the confines of those four walls in a closet-sized office space barely-made-for-one-yet-shared-between-two, I’d lost all sense of willpower that was years in the making. Somewhere between that first interaction and our last, polite conversation became constant inside jokes. Long days in the office became longer nights in my car. Weekends in bars alongside my friends became mysterious flus and a location conveniently turned off. Every conversation without her was a losing battle fighting the urge to speak her name. I could feel the eyes rolling and the sighs echoing in the room before her name—Abbey—rolled off my tongue for the umpteenth time that evening. I couldn’t understand why everywhere I went I was reminded of her; this new person in my life.
This friend. Barely. An acquaintance. Not even. A colleague. Just some coworker. When my staff finally arrived—three straight tall blondes with long flowing hair and legs that were even longer—I was comforted in knowing these girls were the divine intervention I was waiting for. Sent to me in my time of need to rescue me from the desolate isolation that was so clearly taking over my brain. These were the girls I would have something in common with. Or so I thought, until every check-in with my camp was accompanied by Abbey. I couldn’t tell if she took a liking to me or the blonder, brighter, thinner versions of me dancing three rooms down the hall from our office.
Abbey and I moved in sync, me in front and her following too closely behind like a shadow. That shadow quickly doubled—while I couldn’t see at the time who was the winner of Abbey’s affections—I knew instantly that one of the taller, thinner, blonder girls, The Dancer, took a liking to her. It started with superfluous visits to our office, her questions directed at me while her eyes pointed towards her. Then it became lunches as we relocated from our two-person office to our makeshift staff room to accommodate our third wheel. I found myself wondering who out of the two of us Abbey was going to sit next to? Which one of us was she going to talk to first in the morning? Whose joke made her laugh harder? Which one of us would her eyes drift towards as we sat around that fold-out table? The smile on my face I had when The Dancer first walked through those front doors soon became the reason for my new-found habitual nail biting. As tensions grew, I made excuses to create distance between us and the staff. Strategic coffee breaks. Managerial hierarchy. Authoritative power dynamic. The urgent need to feng shui the office. Embarking on a quest to adopt new email signatures. I realized I wasn’t alone in this effort and noticed that Abbey had started following suit when she surprised me one Monday morning with an iced brown sugar oat shaken espresso and a newly found hideaway.
Somewhere in the drawer of keys we’d been ignoring, and sometimes when I found myself lost in my thoughts as I plotted our next escape, she discovered a permanent solution. She led me up three flights of stairs where we were met with a heavy green metal door. As she unlocked the door, I saw the four thick blue gym mats she’d carried up those flights and laid out across the floor, along with two bean bags, and a few blankets from home.
“Here,” she said with one arm outstretched like a ringleader at a circus presenting their spectacles.
“Now we can finally be alone,” she continued as she peered up at me with her big brown eyes.
That’s when the lying started. I wasn’t jealous per se. Not of The Dancer. I didn’t want to be alone with Abbey. I didn’t want her all to myself. I just needed The Dancer to do her job and if she was with us–Abbey–all day, then she wasn’t working. I wasn’t jealous in a romantic way. Abbey and I were friends. I didn’t want to be outshined by some other girl. I wasn’t attracted to Abbey. I wasn’t attracted to women. I liked men; she just looked very masculine. I was confused. But no matter how many times I repeated these affirmations to myself—in my head, in the mirror, in the car on the way to work before picking her up—I couldn’t stop myself from making my way to that room every day. It was an out-of-body experience; I floated above myself as I watched myself climb those stairs for the third time that day, unable to stop myself. Enslaved to the obsession. Hours would go by as we hid away in that room together. It was in that room that I no longer saw her as the curly-headed mop in basketball shorts, but started to really look at her. I didn’t just see her necklace hanging around her neck, but the porcelain skin it hung around. I didn’t just see her big brown eyes, but the dimple on the tip of her nose. The dark brown beauty marks that decorated her body—I’d count each and every one. From the one just above her cupid’s bow on her light pink lips, to the constellations of freckles that painted her shoulders. Soon she infiltrated the corners of my mind reserved for life outside of work. I began taking mental notes, making long drawn-out lists of everything that happened from the moment we were apart to the second we reunited to give her a thorough report. From background character, to best friend, to everything, I denied it every step of the way. It began with some questions.
“Is there something you’re not telling us?” My friends peered over at me as I grinned at my phone, with the right amount of caution but the suspicion of a federal interrogation.
I should’ve stopped there, but the feeling was addictive—like a gaping wound in my cheek from an accidental bite, I couldn’t stop my tongue from running along it no matter how much I tried. The more that I said about her, the bigger the mystery became. The confusion grew, the commentary became increasingly supportive, and all the more frustrating as they all so subtly pointed to something I wasn’t ready to admit.
“You can tell us anything, and we’ll love you no matter what.” As if their acceptance was the one I was holding out for.
“We’re just friends,” I would say.
“Why is it so hard to believe that a straight girl could be friends with a lesbian?” I would argue.
“I’m not gay,” I would assert, with every ounce of belief I contained, but unsure of exactly who it was I was trying to convince.
Every quip of theirs was met with a definitive and defensive retort.
“There’s nothing wrong with two people spending a lot of time together.”
“We just really get along.”
“We’re just really close.”
“I’m comfortable enough in my sexuality to hold hands with a friend.”
To play with her hair. To sit shoulder to shoulder. To rest my head in hers. To have her hand on my thigh. To sleep in each other’s arms. It started as a joke. As the rumours stirred around the building of our close and intimate relationship, we’d only fuel them. On one exceptionally hot and humid Friday July night, we made our way to one of the many mandatory staff socials, and I, in usual fashion, was running late to pick her up. She opened the door to my car, surprised to see me fixing my lip gloss and pointed out that she had never seen me wear makeup before, but made sure to remind me that she thought I looked beautiful either way—just different. Just as I parked before making our way into the bar, I finally looked at her for the first time that evening and I felt my breath stop momentarily. She asked what was wrong, but I brushed it off.
“I just wanted to know if my makeup looks okay before we head inside?” I managed to find the words as I choked over the excuse.
She took her thumb and traced the edge of my jaw and ran it into my neck, blending out some of my bronzer. She looked back into my eyes and said, “Now you look perfect” with her hand still lingering around my neck. As we walked into the bar, I found my hand reach for hers, but pulled away just as we noticed how many eyes shot in our direction, craning two inches down and aligning their vision with our embrace. We stood there together, fingertips just brushing as I wondered at that moment why the joke was no longer funny. We stood at the bar while I waited to order both of our drinks and looked around the room at the many people I saw on a day-to-day basis. For the first time in my many lives at camp, I didn’t know the people I was working with. If this camp were a cult, I was the undercover anthropologist, silently observing its rituals and dynamics. I was Jane Gooddall and they were my gorillas.
As I scanned the room, my eyes caught hers and I realized why I didn’t know these people. As she smiled her soft smile at me, I remembered that as long as I had her, I didn’t want to know these people. At that moment I didn’t care whose eyes would notice, I took her hand in mine, and I saw the light return to her, and finally noticed how affected she was by my previous hesitations. We spent the rest of the evening whispering inside jokes in each other’s ears, somehow speaking in a way no one understood but us. Each time someone came over to talk to us, I felt her thumb draw circles on the inside of my palm, or her hand make its way higher and higher up my thigh. Each time this happened I’d look at her breathlessly. In those moments, I could see the enjoyment in her eyes as she looked between my bright red ears and the bite marks on my bottom lip. This was the reaction she had been waiting for. When we finally made it back to my car we laughed the whole drive home.
As soon as we were alone, I burst out and asked, “Are you insane?”
With a devious smile painted across her face she looked at me and said, “If they didn’t think we were dating before, they definitely do now.”
Just as she finished, I pulled into her driveway. I reached over to hug her goodbye, when this time, the hug lingered longer than usual. Speechless, we looked at each other, our faces much closer than they had ever been before with a friend. The humidity heightened by our breath, our chests close enough to feel our hearts racing as my hands brushed along her back. It wasn’t until the moment we kissed that suddenly my vision became clear.
This time my eyes didn’t break contact. No tequila to tumble amongst the butterflies occupying my stomach. My feet didn’t start running to tell any friends. In fact, within the split second that it happened I had decided for myself—that would never happen again, and I would never tell anyone about it. She was leaving and taking this friendship with her. My whole plan flashed before my eyes as I stared into hers. I wouldn’t visit. We would FaceTime. I’d check-in less and less. She’d be busy, make new friends—find new girls to haunt in their dreams every night and this would be a distant memory. Until it happened again that following Monday, and every day until she left. The first time she called was the day after she went back to school. As she sat atop her dark green duvet, me in the now empty office—one desk, two chairs—I was reminded of her legs once sprawled across mine as we debated between blue or green for her room. Teary-eyed, she told me she missed me, and I jumped at the first opportunity to make the commute. That was the moment I admitted to myself the truth of our friendship. Slowly, one by one, I admitted to all those who clocked it before me the nature of our relationship while still denying the validity.
“We’re just casual,” I would say. To her, to my friends, to myself. There was nothing casual about the way we fell asleep talking to each other every night. Or the shared Pinterest board we made of our future home inspiration. We’d talk about how we’d raise our kids both Catholic and Jewish. How she showed me her Bat Mitzvah video, her dance recitals, and her family vacations because she hated the thought of me missing any moment of her life. There was nothing casual about the way it ended. About my hair falling out. About my skin breaking out into a full-body rash. How I now go to bed every night covered in a thick layer of lotion. My psoriasis flaring up again for the first time in almost a decade. Staying up all night. Puffy-eyed all day. The constant need to be busy. The inability to be alone. The weakness in my knees as I fall to the ground outside of bars, my friends holding my hair, their boyfriends’ arms spread across their shoulders. Somehow, I was sixteen again, and somehow, she was already with someone else.