Memo: Your breakup is like an airplane landing

This was written for the 2017 issue of Verity Magazine. Find more about it here.

Landing in Los Angeles, February 2016 (Photo: Imogen Dewey)

Spoiler: it will all be okay.

There’s a passage in Ben Lerner’s 10:04, where the narrator is leaving a New York hospital:

If you want to pick out the devastated or soon to be devastated from the stream of people leaving Mount Sinai, I decided, don’t look for frank expressions of sorrow or concern, look for the people whose faces resemble those of passengers deplaning after a long flight—a blank expression as the body begins adjusting to a new time zone and ground speed.

It’s powerful because it’s correct.

The aftermath of emotional trauma is strange — a lot like a rough landing in a foreign city. You forget about your new time zone. You miss deadlines, trains, buses, confused because your watch is still set to the old time. You wonder why no one bothers to remind you things now run to a different schedule. You’re slow to adjust.

You remember seeing others ‘deplane’, especially people you love. After an upsetting event, there’s a fatigue in their faces that’s purely physical – a jetlag of circumstances. Devastation is synonymous with shock. And shock is exhausting.

Lerner is writing about people outside a hospital, facing permanent, physical loss of some degree or other. A breakup is a different kind of hurt. But the strange time-lapse between grief and the real world is the same, so his idea holds. 

Leave aside the word ‘romantic’ – which smears everything it tries to describe in a splashy, cheap-pigment wash – something about romantic pain is universalisable. (It’s why pop exists.)

And inevitably, you’ll one day be forced to adjust to ground speed too abruptly. It’s like walking outside after being in a dark room (or a hospital) – into that kind of bright, harsh light that sends dark spots across your vision, where for some reason everything seems louder, and just slightly unbearable. Because what happens — as you realise you’re no longer in transit, as you’re deplaning — is that for a little while the ground makes no sense. 

You loudly talk everyone through your disorientation, because the only thing you are sure of is that none of them have gone through it.

The only thing that is certain is that they have, or will. Death and taxes, or whatever it is.

Everything becomes sticky, and drenched in significance. Words, for a while, have too much meaning. Emotional pain – the surprise of loss – gives you the sense everything is portended, that you are journeying into a dark place alone. It’s the whole point of the Orpheus myth: that no one can go with you, not even – especially not – the one you are losing.

Which is why you talk, until everyone’s sick of you. You try and leave a trail, to say, Don’t lose me! Don’t let me be lost! Or more accurately, Don’t let the thing I am losing be lost. Let me chronicle my hurt, because if you share my pain, maybe I can prove the object of it (or the subject — both? Neither?) is real before it dissolves.

This is theoretical and very personal. Why do you need so badly to tell everyone what happened. Why try and spread your emotions onto the people around you. Why does it feel so good when your friends cry for you. Why do you need to transform your distress into a collective historical event.

‘Pain only reaches beyond itself when its damage shifts from private to public, from solipsistic to collective,’ writes Leslie Jamison in her essay, ‘Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain’. She plays on an Anne Carson poem:

Once pain is cleansed into something silver and necessary, it no longer needs to be illuminated.

Is that what your obsessive storytelling is, an attempt to translate romantic pain into something more valid?

You try and shift it outside of yourself, pouring out the same story over and over, telling and retelling the hurt so it’s anchored to something real (and shared), so the cause of it doesn’t dissolve into something unimportant.

This is why you’re meant to keep a journal, to spare the people around you from the weird, manufactured empathy you force onto them: ‘This is the version of care I would like from you. Please absorb yourselves in my all-consuming hurt, and acknowledge it’s true and correct. Please confirm my watch is telling me the correct time. Please be jetlagged with me.’ 

But you don't spare them. You still ask. And if you keep a journal, you read it too often, acting as your own audience, thoughts refracting inward.

A friend recommends Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment, a novel about a woman left without warning. Reading Olga's fear and desperation is like being hit in the face (something Jamison has a whole essay about, incidentally).

Olga writes letters to her absent husband, tries to retell their time together in a way that makes sense:

The essential, the only real claim I would make on him was that he should listen to me, collaborate in my labour of self-analysis … I begged him to help me understand whether that time had at least had a solidity, and at what point it had begun to dissolve.

She wants him to sign off on their story. The thing with stories though, is that they are necessarily incomplete. To think you have fully accounted for a piece of time is to leave yourself open to ambush, to fall, as Olga says, ‘through a hole in the net of events. We leave so many of them, lacerations of negligence, when we put together cause and effect.’

You build your story — this person was hurtful, a failure — then you’re blindsided by memories of tenderness; of the times they didn’t fail. The only way to stay safe is to open your net again. The story will calcify, become solid enough that you can climb over it and keep going.

You just have to stop looking for answers; or as Rainer Maria Rilke writes, be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart.

Except when you are wounded, all you feel toward the unsolved is a terrible violence. The insistence of it makes you aggressive — like Olga, you become wild and crude. 

'Don’t give in, I said to myself, don’t crash headlong,’ she writes. But, just like you will, she does. ‘Slowly, in spite of my resistance, I gave in to obscenity.’ The urgency of her pain turns her into something ugly. And this hits very close to home.

To gracefully go along with events, to adjust willingly to ground speed, is to make a lie of how much you hurt. Like Olga, you dig in your heels; act out, turn up unwanted in the middle of the night to cry and yell abuse. It feels better to make a new, concrete reality, however grotesque, than let the old one quietly dissolve as if it had never been.

Like Renata Adler writes in Speedboat, another sticky book: 

The thing is to eradicate the What if, or at least postpone it, until it becomes an appropriate, theoretical speculation, on the stable ground.

You try eradicate your hurt, try and make it stable by turning it into a myth. The hurt is Adler’s 'What if' — how have the rules of the universe so suddenly changed; can this strange thing be undone. The myth is your fascination with your own experience — in which, finding that 'What if' unanswerable, you drown it out by changing it into an object of wonder. ‘We fling ourselves upon its simplicity,’ Jamison writes, ‘so it can render us heavy and senseless, deliver us finally to the ground.’

The person on the other end of your romantic hurt tries to tell you it is fine. That you are okay. They push ground speed on you before you can possibly calibrate it; tell you there is no cause for pain. But ‘pain without cause is pain we can’t trust,’ Jamison writes. ‘We assume it’s been chosen or fabricated.’

And you wonder, with a terrible vertigo, if you have invented your own suffering.

‘I am not a melodramatic person,’ Jamison says we tell ourselves. But confronted with your own very melodramatic actions, you’re stuck: between performing resistance to pain — dismissing the melodrama — and performing pain straight-up, again and again, in its most basic and brutal forms.

Then, a frightening weightlessness. Am I sad? you wonder in the middle of the night, at two in the morning as passing headlights shine up in on your ceiling. You lie calm and still, and listen to the cars. Maybe not. 

It’s not liberating, this thought; it’s a swift, silent, vacuum. If you feel nothing, what happened had no significance. There’s no permanence to your history, and therefore, perhaps, to you. Everything gets very blurry. Olga calls it ‘an absence of sense’. 

‘I had to hold onto something,’ she writes, ‘but could no longer remember what. Nothing was solid, everything was slipping away … something in my senses wasn’t working. An interruption of feeling, of feelings.’

People think Pablo Neruda is corny, but he understands how one person can cast another into ‘an absence of sense’ — long before the discarded person becomes aware of what is happening. 

Excerpt from ‘The Dream’:

And I, sinking and coming out,

Decided that you should come out

Of me, that you were weighing me down

Like a cutting stone,

And I worked out your loss

Step by step:

To cut off your roots,

To release you alone into the wind.

You are alone in the wind. Interrupted. There are no instructions on how to get away from nowhere, or none that work, anyway.

But Adler knows something, in Speedboat: ‘As is clear from the parking regulations, however, there are situations in which you are not entitled to stop.’

This is the thing everyone says to you, about time — you are not entitled to stop. Time will make you a new skin whether you want one or not. Just don’t look down while it’s happening (or back, if you are Orpheus).

Loosen your limbs; allow for, like Lerner describes it, ‘a blank expression as the body begins adjusting to a new time zone and ground speed’.

It will.

The story will crumble on its own. Olga’s absent husband ‘become[s] again the good man he had perhaps always been,’ and she realises: ‘I no longer loved him.’ People are just people. Love may be built on pedestals — perhaps — but part of adjusting to your new time zone is the decision not to build new ones out of hurt.

The structures you put up — the emotions you over-perform so others can see them from the outside, so you are not alone — are necessary. But they need not be permanent. Build them from straw.

Because Jamison and Carson are right. Time cleanses your distress into something ‘silver and necessary’. You re-emerge at ground speed. To your friends, and bosses, and your family. Hoping to find meaning in the distance of your now-absorbed hurt. ‘That’s life, there it goes,’ you say. ‘This is how we live and love, and what happens.’

This is Lerner’s deplaning.

Everything about his plane metaphor works for me. It also makes me think of a friend who says the happier I get, the less I talk in metaphors. They are a way to negotiate bumpy landings — the strange gaps between earth and experience. But once you finally get to ground speed, you don’t need them.

I no longer want to read my own notebooks. I talk to my friends not so they can bear witness, reassure me I exist, but because I want their advice. Because I like hearing what happens to them, what they think about. 

Because I know now, deplaning is something you do alone. Adjust to ground speed, without having another flight booked. Look around you, and see where you have landed.