A podcast I follow on Instagram posted something recently that said closure is a myth and the desire for it can keep one stuck in a rumination cycle (I’m paraphrasing quite generously, it actually said “closure is a myth invented by big sad”). I went through an intense breakup two years ago, and my ex and I stopped speaking without much closure. I have dreams about us reconciling every so often. Right after we broke up, I lost my job working for someone I really liked, and my closest friends stopped speaking to me. It was what I like to refer to as a mass exodus of white people from my life.
The more time that passes, and maybe with each therapy session (I’ve had approximately 74 sessions and counting in the two years since, not to brag), the dreams I have about the most difficult season of my life seem to settle in tandem with my nervous system. An intertwined and more frequent dream I have is one where I’m reunited with the pets my ex and I shared, who I haven’t seen and have been grieving for two years.
A year ago, I had a recurring dream where one of the cats would show up at the foot of my bed in the dead of night, and beg me, with words, to let him stay. Those dreams would ruin my entire next day because I’d spend it immensely sad, with no idea where to put the sadness. A few weeks ago I dreamt that this same cat got lost in the woods, and we found him in a stranger’s house where we cornered him and locked him in a room so he couldn’t escape again. He was distressed, and, for the first time in the dream realm, he didn’t recognize me. It seemed that my subconscious was finally starting to move on.
A dozen or so dreams later, I was en route to a first date with the love of my life on a sunny, temperate morning. Before, though, I scheduled a meet up with my ex, out of genuine courtesy, to let her know that I was about to start dating the love of my life. When we saw each other we apologized and reconciled, and as we were talking again, as friends, I chose not to share the news about my date. I woke up before I made it there.
I am aware that I am a torch-carrier. I still feel fondly for crushes that I haven’t spoken to in twenty years. I had a romantic moment with my college crush a few months ago after having not seen him for five years, and it felt like no time had passed and I was twenty-one again and smitten by him. Still, I think that, like grief, love is a cycle and never truly leaves the body. When you love someone and they leave your life, there is no true closure because you will always love them, however frustrating it may be.
Even though I’ve moved on, I’m very happy, and my life has moved forward, the version of myself that was in love with my ex-girlfriend still lives in my body. I talk to this version of me often, in fact, because she is the hypervigilance I experience when I face the fear of loss. When we seek closure I think we are seeking an experience that negates loss, because it’s easier to override the grief than it is to feel it. Of course, the only way to truly move on from anything is to let ourselves feel the pain of losing it.
My mother told me a psychological analogy for grief years ago. She said that grief is like a huge ball in a box that’s pressing hard on a button that causes pain to be felt. The more time that passes, the more the ball shrinks and deflates, but it never disappears. As life moves around, so does the ball in the box, and inevitably there will be moments and days where the ball hits the button and we will feel the pain and sadness of grief all over again and have to move through it, but it won’t feel everlasting, as it once did.
I am disturbed by my inability to relate to the queer stereotype of staying friends with an ex. If every other pair of sapphic exes can stay friends, why couldn’t we? It’s annoying and weird and felt wrong for so long. When we broke up my assumption was that we would go back to being best friends, because we were friends first. When that didn’t happen, it broke my heart and my heart will always be a little bit broken because friendship, to me, is the most unconditional form of love. I’ve come to accept that that’s all it is – disturbing and annoying. There’s no fixing to do, there are no more amends to be made, it’s just a weird and sad ending to a formative relationship.
Unless you’re co-parenting, or you work together, there is maybe no reason to be friends with an ex. The only way I’ve been able to get anything resembling closure is from reaching for it on my own, by accepting life as it is and as it comes and by believing in my ability to choose to change for the better. I love my life now – even my romantic life – and it’s a life I would have never envisioned, and one I would not be living, had I not bravely left what was a very comfortable relationship with a very loving and caring person when we stopped being right for each other.
Desperately seeking closure is like duct-taping the button in your grief box to be pressed down forever. There is no way to speed up the healing and grieving process, all there is to do is feel and carry. Moving on doesn’t mean forgetting. When I am reminded of her or of the animals we shared, I am finally able to just sit with it for a moment and move on without feeling winded.
With the help of a really, really good therapist, my friends, and my creature, one day I simply realized that I hadn’t thought about my ex, or my old job, or my old friends, in hours. Then it was days, and then weeks passed and the memory of the breakup and everything that came with it became more of a passive thought than a fixture in my brain. I made new friends, I got closer to the friends I had, I fell in and out of love, I took my dog to Mount Whitney, I conquered my fear of the dentist (turns out I have perfect teeth), I got better at guitar and I learned how to truly care for and respect myself so that one day, when I commit to someone, I’m not trying to draw from an empty well.
I spent a long time feeling like I was inherently deficient and unlovable, and that I’d done something deeply wrong and punishable to experience so much loss so close together. I have come to believe that big gifts follow loss, and my favorite of the gifts I’ve gotten is the flock people who were still around when the dust settled, who chose to stay by my side, however pathetic I felt. It is from them, and the people who have come into my life since, that I have learned what it is to be truly and unconditionally loved. My favorite quote from Sex and the City is when Charlotte York says to her best friends, “Maybe we are each other’s soulmates!” and it’s time to give her a retroactive Pulitzer for spouting something as wise as anything Robert Frost ever had to say.
