Paul · 11 May 2003
Ach. Damn.
Sitting here, grizzled and hoary atop thirty six years, I could catalogue several of my own such lurches (snappings? manglings? there has to be a better term than ‘breakups’), but what would be the point when amid the rubble and the dust those events rarely produce much that is informative, let alone useful to another. It’s too much even to tick off:
- A previously unknown balance of power made suddenly both visible and wildly unstable
- Poorly aimed words, meticulously misread
- The menacing phone glowing silent in the corner
- A hollowing-out of the rewards of kindness
- Drinks. Strong brown drinks
In my experience (I have no one else’s) the worst of the torment of a bitter end usually came not from feelings of rejection or invalidation or loss – though those piled up like hills and mountains – but rather from things I heard myself saying. Yes asshole, that was you put that together, aren’t you proud. Turn it around in your head for years, pretend the words meant something else, that somehow they landed on gracious and forgiving ears, but you can’t get them back. Ever. Let’s paraphrase a dead French male: we can forgive those who’ve hurt us, but not those we hurt.
Folksy wisdom. If in the warzone of a breakup your instinct is to cut loose and part with whatever pride you can salvage, then fair enough and on your bike. But know that in doing so, it’s entirely likely that elements of what attracted you to the person on the other side of the burning bridge in the first place, and indeed all the reasons you even care enough to be upset in the moment, are going to congeal and ferment and blow spitballs at the back of your head forever.
The last thing anyone wants to hear – during the days of rotting flowers and spattered walls, through the nights of long knives – is advice on how best to buck up, move on with life, hit the ground running. It always seems blatantly secondhand.
But when someone you like and admire is amid all that is heartbrokenness, there can be nothing wrong with saying what you feel.
What I feel. I think Paul’s a genius. He’s contributed so much in wit and sparkling clear writing and linguistic playfulness and ideas of semantics and narrative and XML and other stuff I can’t pretend to keep up with that a special wing of the worldwide inter-net should be put up in his name. He’s genuinely, unshakeably good, and he loves my dog Oliver though they’ve never met.
There, now you tell him what you feel.
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