Break.up

by Joanna Walsh

  He says, ‘I thought you wanted to experiment.’ This is not something I have said. I say, ‘I’m sort of committed to someone back in London.’ ‘Oh,’ he says, disgusted, ‘A “romance” thing.’

  We finish the fish, and I leave politely. I walk back angry. He feels cheated. I feel cheated. I had thought he was too old. He had not thought I had thought so. Perhaps he does not know I think so. Perhaps I am wrong to think so, but he is, at least for me. It would be boring to be cross, naive, but I am allowed to have a preference. Am I cross? Who knows. I’m tired. I don’t care. I’m enervated, slightly ecstatic. Something has woken up in me. Something has happened in my blood. At any rate. I feel sorry for him.

  It was my story that got him. I loved it when you told me stories. I didn’t care if they were all the same stories, stuck on repeat. Tell me again. Story is a disease. One of its symptoms is desire, love even, though I find it impossible to describe love in a story, not without dissimilitude, for as soon as I show one side of love, another side’s face down, a playing card, a six-sided dice, a twenty-sided dice. Everything I do is about telling my story but no one will ever know the whole thing all at once: on paper I can never be 3D all the way around. For my convenience you have become a story, have coalesced temporarily at least, and I have used you to provoke lodging, friendship, lust. I am ashamed at my proficiency, and it is the first time I have been ashamed of anything on this journey so far, with a shame that comes from something I have done, not something that has been done to me. That’s progress, perhaps! All the same I won’t do it again. I will not explain you to myself. I will not explain you to other people. I do not like any longer not to find stories difficult. Let me put things back into the wrong order. Let me not get them straight. Let everything be fresh and terrible again. Let my thoughts of you not be worn down by the thinking, let me be too tired to think at all. Elegance comes with experience, but one can be too elegant. I need all those lets to put the brakes on words that slip out too easily, as I let my story out hand over hand. I need the nots to tie it down – without them, it’s so easy to slip up.

  And in the morning I am back at Berlin central station as though I never left. It’s early and I’m hungover after last night. A man comes up to me in shades, at 6am, black leather jacket. He looks like Lou Reed in Berlin (I mean the album), he looks like the ghost of Berlin (I mean the city, or the dream of it anyway, as I have seen so little of the reality). He walks up to me and says, in German-accented English, ‘Gimme ten Euros.’ ‘I’m sorry…’ an automatic reply. He turns sharply. ‘You’re sorry? I’m sorry. Don’t cry, baby, boo hoo.’ I want to call him back, to explain that I’m not sorry for anything really: that it’s just something the English say.

  On the train, I sleep. I am getting closer to the moment that might take place between us, if it’s possible to use that word, us, again. I hope I will dream about you. If I dream about you I hope there will be no reason not to dream. Love like hope… I hope, however hopeless, that you dream about me too.

  I think it is unlikely.

  I dream you are driving to the airport in your old brown car. I am in the passenger seat though I will not board the plane. We are on a flyover which is, I think, in London. The car’s steering wheel is on the left, like the cars on the continent, but it is still your car and when I look across at you, you are sitting on the right, as you would in England, but I think you are driving on the right, as you would on the continent, and that the traffic flows as it would there too. I know that you are leaving. You have written a stack of self-help books, or perhaps they are travel guides. They are on the seat beside you. I am also on the seat beside you. But they are there too and, at the same time I am not, and when I am there, they are not, and yet there they are.

  Why did anyone ever think dreams told the future? Only the simple dreamer dreams directly, said Artemidorus. OK then I am simple, conjuring only what I know I desire, but my dreams pull no punches, they bring something to an end, which I do not desire, which is something my waking mind will not do. He will come back, my dreams say or, more often, he has gone.

  The first time I dreamt of you was the week after you ditched me. We were in a foreign city, you’d been going to get married all along. My job was to help your girlfriend choose a dress. Who would give me such a job? I don’t know. Perhaps I gave it to myself.

  And why do I deal you all the best cards?

  The dreams I have are images, mostly. I dream in colour but I don’t remember sound. Words happen in my dreams, but they are rarely written and never heard, like in a porn clip. My dreams, post-Freudian retrospectors, show porn films from the might-have-been. Only in daydreams do I hear you speak – those romcom fantasies, those meetings cute, whole conversations I have had the leisure to invent. The different outcomes play helplessly on loop across my mind, but only when awake. I am, perhaps, more helpless awake than asleep.

  A dream can be a repetition of desire, or a repetition of absence, as a successful diet is a repetition of absence. My dreams are a regime of some kind, but I did not ask for my life to be mended. Awake, I don’t want to forgive, or condemn you, to find excuses for your behaviour, or reasons. And I do not want love softened to liking, friendship, to pity, or to dismissal. What is my brain playing at?

  19th May

  I stay in Paris overnight: a friend’s floor. So now just the wait… four hours… not even that.

  Sitting opposite two women on the Eurostar I hear the money talk, and family talk. I’ve only seen the social ribs since I no longer fit, and now they stick out: the children, the holidays, the boyfriends, the plans…

  One says, ‘I love Paris, but I wouldn’t want to go on my own.’

  The other says, ‘Well, you’ve got your life now, haven’t you?’

  What is that?

  Whatever it is, it makes me furious.

  I’ve never not wanted to go anywhere alone. I like to be on my own, but my ‘own’ isn’t something I’ve got: it’s as slippery as my life. What I own of my life is often in relation to someone else, but I don’t need them always to travel with me. Yes, other people own parts of my life, and, if they tear their part of it out, well, that’s torn it, but it’s no more than a rip. How old are these women? One is 50ish, one looks younger than me. And they’ve both ‘got’ their life, already, mortgage paid, rent-free. How repulsive to have caught hold of that slippery thing that will soon die for being held, a fish out of water. ‘Forget about him, get a life,’ that’s what some friends have told me, as though love were outside of life. Or do they mean that grieving for love, missing someone, is the opposite of life, that a full life should be stuffed full, with no room for this necessary nothing happening?

  The time we’ll meet is moving towards me. I can feel the elevator movement, the rush of falling. It’s like when you know you’re about to spill a glass of water before you do, and you carry the movement through almost on purpose. It’s like when you’re going down a steep hill in a car, and your stomach anticipates the lurch. I could do something about it – but only in the negative. I can’t speed up my arrival, but I could postpone, could cancel it altogether. No messages for the last 24 hours. 36 hours ago, you were ‘probably’ (leaving for London) ‘today or tomorrow morning’. I’m cowed by your terseness, can’t pare things down further in reply. The only way I can go is into silence. We used to email twenty times a day, more. You’re not one to lie, at least I think, but, are you being economical with the truth? At least you’re travelling toward me this time. You’ve never done that before. You told me what time your train gets in. Regulated by timetables, so long as you’re on board, you lack the opportunity to be late.

  I sleep. I will make myself nothing until you wake me.

  I don’t write to you.

  You don’t write to me.

  I don’t dream about you.

  14 London/Ending

  19 May

  So, in the future perfect, which is now the past, my train will have pulled into the station
. We will have met. We will have drunk a couple of strong afternoon cocktails at a nearby bar for Dutch courage, then I will have put my hand in yours and you will have leant toward me and kissed me and then you (we) will have stopped and, you will have said, Welcome to England.

  And that will have been a great moment.

  But it wasn’t of course you weren’t when I got to at was, when you that will met way over, no not yet that wasn’t which, whenever where we? Were we couldn’t not, not, only glass, the things between glass light mid-afternoon was tick off people not, not no, no all of them not, no. Not, glass breaking, light broken no wasn’t, and still there isn’t, will, will be is light, lighted, lit.

  Lit: past tense, yes, that’s all for the present. Something separated, orange and blue as through glass, leaving me on the side I wasn’t before, with that fuzz in the head – adrenaline is it, or vertigo? – that tells me I have put myself at the mercy. Of what? Of something, someone: you? Me? You weren’t there. Of course. I knew it already.

  I had always known it.

  What else did I expect? You were often late, but absence has a different quality. It wasn’t that you weren’t there, your not-being-there had gone somewhere else too. Something about it had already passed. The moment spun into the past as trees turn from a speeding train. It had seemed that they were moving, but it was me, and you can’t stop a train like you can stop a car. A passenger, passive, there was nothing I could do to go back. The moment became an object. Already I had wrapped it up and put it away, put some time and space between me and it, such a little time and space, no more than from the train to the platform but, as I looked back, it narrowed, so quickly, to almost nothing, as parallel railway tracks appear to meet in the distance so that, from far enough away, they look like a single black line. If you draw one here it splits the page into past and present. Once you’ve finished, you’re free to decide what side of it you’re on.

  • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  Or perhaps you’re not.

  There I was. Now here I am.

  I am shocked to find myself here.

  Here is less than there, one letter less, evidence something has been lost, though I’m not sure exactly what, or when or how.

  I get out my phone, click on maps. The pointer says YOU ARE HERE. Well, that’s something I suppose. Here I am again, back at the railway station where I started, but I’m not in the same place. I still want to be in love, but find it’s nowhere I can stay.

  Now that I’ve crossed that line, come to love’s borders, I find I can’t go back. I am looking back at something. Was it love? I can no longer tell. Love resists the past tense: I loved you points squarely to that state’s present absence, but a declaration of love exists in the continuous present, slips from the moment, boundaryless, sends imperfect fingers into the future: I love you = I will always love you; you can’t say it without a gesture toward forever. Whatever: love’s nothing I can hold onto, its abstract never comes to rest in an articled noun. You can have a truth, or a war, but a love? Be a love is an injunction to a person to act nicely – to act, yes, but passively, according to instruction. A love is not a lover, as lovers often do not act nicely, nor do they do as they are told. There’s a problem with the noun: it slips towards the verb. Love is an active word, always on the move.

  Every love states that it is eternal… a declaration of eternity to be fulfilled or unfurled as best it can be within time.

  Badiou, In Praise of Love

  ‘You’re not even my ex,’ you told me once. Ex sounds like it should be a suffix, something in the past, but it’s a prefix, a beginning. As I am not a satisfactory ex, love is nothing from which I can begin to leave. Unable to exit as to stay, where can I go from here? Nowhere, it seems, not for the moment.

  Has something not happened to me? Was the whole thing not an event?

  Kierkegaard, Repetition

  I sit down on one of the benches in the station’s concourse outside the Eurostar terminal, where there are bars, and cafés, and shops selling small comforts: cakes, magazines, and makeup, one book-shop, and this moment segues into the last moment I was here.

  Time flattens. I scroll through my timeline to prove I got anywhere at all. The awful thing about the internet is that you can pinpoint the time anything ends. My last message from you was at exactly 12.59 one Saturday, saying you would be late. It is 12.58 now, and it’s a Saturday again, for the days come round relentlessly as good weather. It doesn’t seem impossible that, at the moment the number flicks over so the time matches exactly, under the spell of the clock, you will appear.

  Waiting for you I have wasted so much time like this, breaking down days into hours, crumbling hours into minutes. I’ve torn off the dates from the day I last saw you, screwing them up, stuffing them into my pockets, hoping to unfold them sometime with you. It’s almost a year now since we first met, and soon enough that date will re-cycle, regular as clockwork. How can it have been a year ago? How can the days approach, plain, with no snags? How can those dates continue to exist: surely they were blown off the calendar, leaving nothing but a smoking hole?

  The end of love is terrible, but the end of the end of love is sadder. I am sick that time, which does not bring love to an end, also brings love to an end. I know there will be another year, and another year after that, each repeated date papering over the last. And, in the meantime, as time is mean, and as I am not even your ex, I could try to continue to love you, unrequitedly, but – I don’t think – unconditionally, or my love would be a gift, like love for a child, not an exchange between adults. Romantic love is a selfish condition. It demands a response, which it always gets, as even the lack of response, turned seamy-side by the lover, is response enough. Love takes place in the conditional which is not even a tense but a mood, twinned with the wishful-thinking subjunctive.

  The conditional pulls possibilities back into past, while the subjunctive shunts the sentence forward, still hoping hopelessly for something to arrive: a heavy carriage and a failing engine. Not governed by tenses that find a home in clockwork time, any sentence in this double mood bats back and forth, bypassing the present, restlessly going nowhere.

  No surprise: no condition is ever satisfactory for a break-up. Breakup suggests breakdown but the more I break it down, the more I layer up reasons – all those ifs and buts – and they are no resting place. The more it’s broken down, the less sense I can make of it, until the whole thing doesn’t look like anything at all by the time you sweep up the pieces. How could I ever have tried to build a story out of love, which is all fragments? It takes time to write about moments with their fractal edges, to link them up, and the more insignificant the pieces, the fiddlier it is to put them together into something wide enough to travel across. Writing it down seems such a waste of time.

  How much time have I wasted, thinking, writing about you?

  For almost the last year I have thought, have written, every day about love. Every day I have a new thought, and it is easy to have new thoughts; the new thoughts never end. My notes sprout notes, but not conclusive ones. The more there are, the further away you get, the more thicknesses of paper I put between us, and the longer it takes to tell even the simplest story. The further apart we are in time, the more I have of you, but the less you are yourself. I have had almost a year to build you. You are now something else, something more mine than yours. Your head has rested beside mine on my pillow for almost a year, no, only the thought of your head, and I have thought about you every day. I still love the thought of you. It stays beside me, and it looks almost exactly like you. I’ve wasted all my time thinking about you, or, rather, I’ve wasted all my time thinking about my thoughts about you until I’m not sure I can tell the difference between you and them any more. There is so very little to link one thought to another. The art lies in the conjunctions.

  All these words, and I still don’t kno
w how to make art out of love.

  I remember a piece of art where the artist wore a red dress that covered her from neck to beyond her feet, like a lead apron, but was also so red as to make her look as though she might have been skinned. She sat in a bare room on a chair by a table, and the table was bare, and there was space around the table and chair, which were in the middle of the room, with the audience round the edge, standing against the square walls at a safe distance, like at a boxing match. Across the table, opposite the artist, was another chair, and she invited the audience to sit in this chair and look at her. In this piece she was looked at, and she looked back. I say ‘audience’ but I mean one person at a time, so that there were only two of them, the artist and the other, while the looking was going on. Then a photographer took a picture so that the rest of the audience could see what that person looked like when he or she looked at the artist, and maybe this was also a souvenir so the lookers could remember what they looked like when looking, or could prove that they had looked, because no one spoke during the piece, or wrote anything down. It was the kind of art that some people find difficult to call a ‘piece’ of art – as it wasn’t something you could keep hold of, or frame and hang in a gallery (maybe that’s what the photographer was for) – although the same sort of people are usually happy to call other things that don’t last a ‘piece’, like a ‘piece’ of theatre, or a ‘piece’ of music.

  Marina Abramović

  The Artist is Present, 2010

  This piece was a bit like that other piece the artist did years before with a table on which she put 72 objects including a rose a feather honey a whip scissors a scalpel a gun a single bullet, and with them a note that said she would allow the people in the audience to do things to her, which they did: having ripped off her dress, they pushed thorns into her flesh, and threatened to shoot her.