Thirteen.

It's fun to see what my abandoned outputs, as I parsed my loss through prose, were and could be.

In the summer of 2022, I was down bad. My breakup was still fresh, and I was doing whatever I could to make amends with my ex-boyfriend.

In as many ways, I wanted him to know that I was sorry, that I loved him, that maybe he still loved me, and I tried to match my actions to my words. I called his skincare specialist to prepay for his facial treatments; I had bouquets of roses delivered to his apartment on a monthly basis; I wrote him a letter about all the reasons why I adored him and attached laminated copies of our photos to boot.

My therapists knew that I was hurting, and they tried to talk me out of it. "He doesn't want to be with you," one of them would repeat, bluntly, not unkind but still honest enough to make me burst into tears. She was right—he didn't want to be with me. He was steadfastly determined to "move on to his next chapter," as he'd said to me, and whatever that looked like simply didn't also include me. Moreover, she said that I was setting myself up for further rejections, each one a gut punch as heavy as the last. By organizing these overtures to him, I raised my own hopes; as he responded to each with mere silence, I crashed once more.

I came to my senses in June. I'd spent a night (platonically) hanging out with a boy who'd asked if I wanted to sleep over; I'd declined out of fear that I was reading too much into his suggestion, because he probably actually meant that I would be sleeping on his couch and not with him. I returned home and, as I ordered more flowers for my ex-boyfriend, I was reminded by what my therapist had said: I was only setting myself up for more rejection. Enough was enough—I called the florist and canceled my order. Instead, I took that money and signed up for creative writing classes through Gotham Writers Workshop.

Even prior to this breakup, which has become a formative catalyst for all of my writing since, I'd been working on a memoir-style collection for eventual publication. As I finally mustered the mental resolve to refrain from sending my ex-boyfriend any more gifts, thereby allowing myself to begin moving on, I knew that I needed an emotional outlet. I reasoned that creative writing classes would achieve two goals: I'd have a place to direct all of my emotional output, and I'd be forced to work on my broader goal of completing my novel.

My classes were weekly and held over Zoom. After the workday, during which I was wholly unproductive because I was still distraught, I would log into our class over video conference with approximately ten other people to workshop my drafts or practice various written techniques.

Honestly, it was kind of fun. I had an excuse to venture outside my comfort zone and try different styles of writing; without the mandated instruction, I would normally feel too embarrassed to be writing in those ways because they don't feel true to me at all.

Take, for example, the below:

It’s been two weeks since I last cried
I just haven’t felt much of the need, until
yesterday
I felt it well up within
but I didn’t give it enough fuel to release, so
the waves subsided
receded into my recesses

Do I deny myself catharsis by not following through?

But I’ve cried so much in the past three months
I just don’t see the point
I’d like to move on
forward

I haven’t yet figured out
whether it’s you
or just the fact that you
were someone

I've always shied away from poetry because I haven't studied its various rhythmic structures, and, to speak frankly, because I'm afraid of putting out bad writing. But writing for a class gave me purchase to experiment with structures and phrasings, words I customarily never use presented in syntaxes I would otherwise be too mortified to attempt. I had every excuse to try and, so, I did.

As the instructor narrated, I clicked around absentmindedly through my computer files. In my recycling bin, I found an electronic copy of my ex-boyfriend's coronavirus vaccination card, which we'd needed to upload for some of the travel we had done. His omnipresence haunted me.

Other exercises prompted us to incorporate certain words or feelings, such as the five senses, written as if the narrator were blind:

A brisk knock at my door; I walk over to open it. The air that rushes into my apartment brings with it a familiar friend—a warm scent, almost like fresh laundry—and I know immediately that it’s him.

“Hi,” he says, in his clipped staccato of Singaporean English; by how the sound of the word is framed as it exits his mouth, I can tell he’s smiling.

I step aside to let him in. He closes the door behind him and pulls me in tight, his lips pressed against mine. He’s shorter than I am, so he stands on tip-toe. As he kisses me, tasting of mint, I wrap my arms around him. "He’s ironed his shirt again," I think to myself, feeling its creaseless fabric with my hands. My right hand moves up to cup the back of his head (his hair is cropped short, neat, and fades from slightly longer up top to nothingness below) to keep his face against mine just a little bit longer.

There’s a weird sensation in my chest. It has the depth of urgency, as if I need to do something right now, and its impulsivity steers my mind onto one thought only: him. The simultaneous sensations of him in my mind and him in my arms, the collision of psychodramatic desire with physical possession, make me almost giddy with lightheadedness. I didn’t realize it, but I’d been thinking of him all day, anticipating this very moment.

Is this what they call love?

My teacher told me to lean into the emotions of my breakup if that was what fueled my output at the time but, although I physically felt the relief I was giving myself by letting out my emotions in this way, I didn't want everything I would write in class to be about the one person I was trying to get over. I felt like a stereotype, and I was determined to plumb my own depths for other source material. Luckily for me, I had plenty.

“You take me for granted,” Yin had said. The warmth I would see in her eyes and that would suffuse her voice had long since disappeared; our East Village apartment no longer felt like home.

My immediate reaction was denial, and her words echoed in my head, repeated ad nauseam. “I don’t do that,” I thought to myself, “do I?”

I had loved her, dearly. She was my best friend of five years, and we had a shared coming of age in New York, enabling one another to discover and explore our sexual identities. She had been by my side through both of my boyfriends and countless flings, and I was one of the only people with her when she came out to her family.

I imagined her turning away, stalking back into her room and slamming the door behind her. Of course, this didn’t actually happen; she had said this to me through text message and, besides, she’s not the type to slam doors. Hers was a dispassionate anger, devoid of emotion, neither hot nor cold but, simply, empty. Emptiness marked the depths of her upset with me, an endless void where her love for me used to exist.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw something, to grab her blue plastic spray bottle and squirt water everywhere, to shout and yell and cry. How could I lose her? She was one of the extraordinarily few people who truly understood me, and I blew it. My ring finger agonized, a band-shaped area achingly naked with the absence of her silver ring that I would always borrow so that I never felt alone. How did things get this bad? 

Yin moves out, and I’m left in the apartment. I wander the hallway, unfeeling, numb to my core; I’m a skeleton rowing a boat atop the malaise that’s submerged our relationship—drowned by the liquid of that stupid spray bottle—the foundation of which having become, as a result, unsalvageable. I’ll never be able to fix this.

I don’t stop thinking of her, don’t stop looking for traces of her within all of my remaining and all of my subsequent new friends. The echoes of her haunt me, reappearing throughout the rest of my life. She never leaves my mind, her corpse lying flat within my boat as I try to row on and move forward with my life, her absence so unavoidably present. Nobody plays the role of best friend quite the same.

After reading aloud what I'd written for the class to dissect, my teacher asked what makes me happy. I didn't know how to answer—I hadn't felt joy in months, and I apologized for consistently bringing melancholia to the class, but I responded that it's simply being with the people I cherish. I've already had enough losses to last me a lifetime.

At the end of the semester, I opted not to enroll in the next courses. I wanted to return when I had much more material to workshop, and I was feeling overwhelmed from all the emotional excavation I was doing. I wanted to give myself a break from keeping open my wounds so that they might begin to heal, and I wanted to move on to my own next chapter.