Breakup, Makeup, Shakeup

Breakup, Makeup, Shakeup It was an old lover’s birthday a few days ago. Closure came earlier this year, and since then we have never exchange any more words after trading “I’m sorry’s” and “I loved you” those many months ago. Four days ago, I broke the mutually imposed ice blue curtain of civility and sent her a short but somewhat evocative greeting through Friendster. I didn’t realize the ramifications of such a move and for the next four days, we have exchanged brief messages that I now realized is slowly intensifying the closure that I so badly wanted since we broke up. Short messages as they were, I started to find out what’s going on in her life and vice versa. No, it does not prick my heart anymore as it used to whenever I see the picture of her and her new love (my replacement) on her profile. I held back from slinging sarcastic one-liners and I managed to write replies conveying some semblance of warmth and friendliness. Amazingly, the constricting pain that has been lashing my heart for quite some time is gone now. This is my closure, and I accept the finality of it.

But dear friends, first let me tell you how it was.

When this love affair ended, I was broken, completely. My whole being shut down, and even if my friends were telling me how brave I was for not succumbing to pain, I knew that there was something wrong. Looking back, I’d rather had myself wallowed for a while instead of trying to move on immediately, without feeling anything. For me, that’s worse than being broken. Because when you’ve stopped feeling anything, it means that you’re all used up and it’s going to be harder to recover from that. When you’re used up, there’s nothing to fix, there’s naught but space. And how could one fill such a vast space like an empty heart?

Alcohol can only do so much.

Because love is self-annihilation, it does not really matter if your relationship with someone ran a total of 10 years, or 8 months, or 10 days. When you’re in love, you cease to be yourself and you tend to love selfLESSly.

When you caress your lovers at night, kiss them in the morning as they saunter off to work, or even when your tongues lash at each other during moments of anger there is always an exchange of essence and somehow these things would bind you to that person, making you one and integrated that it would be hard to distinguish the one from the other, thus obliterating any veneer of self-existence.

It dawned on me that it’s perfectly all right to be broken.

We are pieces of puzzles, like that old love song says. You put them together and some would not fit, but some would. Sometimes puzzles get scattered all over as turbulent relationships do and the broken pieces had to be refitted once again. And it’s okay. Because you have absorbed so much from that person, when you separate, you have to break so that you can shake off any lasting imprint of that person from your being that will make moving on harder for you.

I have been the letters inside the Boggle Case. I’ve been shook up, turned upside down, and rattled so badly that I thought I might never be the sam(n?)e again.

Recently, I’ve started feeling again. It was just a warm feeling at the tip of my toes. The merest of shivers but that was enough. Slowly, I am freeing myself of this atrophy that has been keeping me from breathing. I am not so dead inside anymore.

Ladies and Gentlemen, congratulate me, I’m out of the coffin.