Icarus Daughter

Breaking up with someone is so fucking awful it makes me wish I'd never dated anyone, ever. Because it's not like you can just say, oh, it's over, and move on.

Been a bad weekend for that. I went to the Don Cabellero show on Saturday night, and while it was cathartic to have those bass lines pushing through my sternum from 10 feet away, and while I think I made a new friend, the show was full of people who knew that Mike and I have broken up. Word's gotten out. People I hardly know were saying that they'd heard and were sorry and that they understood what I was going through. And I appreciated it, thoroughly. But it made me sad beyond bearing. There was no forgetting that I was smack in the middle of pain.

So I drank. Reliable, if not smart.

As I was leaving, I talked to one of Mike's music friends. We mostly talked about other stuff, but we did talk about Mike too, and at one point, I said I was glad Mike had good people to take care of him.

For whatever reason, that line undid me. I exited the conversation quickly, and sobbed all the way home. Bawled. I felt like someone had made a fist around my sternum and yanked, ripping every other cell out, all that bass-line energy electrocuting what remained. My eyelids were still swollen this morning.

Then tonight, what I've been dreading, we ended up at the same place at the same time. My friend saw him first and gave me the head's up. I froze, welled up, my face caving into itself. She put a plan into action that involved me getting out of there as soon as possible.

Turns out my base instinct is politeness, because I ended up saying hi and howareyou and ohgood and gladtohearit and it was so thin and awkward and we both looked just fucking wrecked. I kept getting more fakey fakey bright, brittle, with each syllable out of my mouth.

We walked outside and I burst into tears again. Unfortunately, the next people out of the bar were the friends he'd gone there to meet. There's public, and then there's public.

In my more bitter moments, this feels like retribution, like I flew too close to the sun. If I hadn't been so happy with him when we first started dating, I wouldn't feel so fucking bad without him.