I was suffering the easily foreseeable consequences.

Addiction is the hallmark of every

infatuation-based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a
heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never dared to admit you wanted-an emotional
speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement. Soon you start craving that
intense attention, with a hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is witheld, you promptly
turn sick, crazy, and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this
addiction in the first place but now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore-- despite the fact
that you know he has it hidden somewhere, goddamn it, because he used to give it to you for
free). Next stage finds you skinny and shaking in a corner, certain only that you would sell your
soul or rob your neighbors just to have 'that thing' even one more time. Meanwhile, the object of
your adoration has now become repulsed by you. He looks at you like you're someone he's never
met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is,you can hardly
blame him. I mean, check yourself out. You're a pathetic mess,unrecognizable even to your own
eyes. So that's it. You have now reached infatuation's final destination-- the complete and
merciless devaluation of self."
David Levithan - The Lover's Dictionary

I was suffering the easily foreseeable consequences. Addiction is the hallmark of

every infatuation-based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration
bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never dared to
admit you wanted-an emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and
roiling excitement. Soon you start craving that intense attention, with a hungry
obsession of any junkie. When the drug is witheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy,
and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this
addiction in the first place but now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore-despite the fact that you know he has it hidden somewhere, goddamn it,
because he used to give it to you for free). Next stage finds you skinny and
shaking in a corner, certain only that you would sell your soul or rob your
neighbors just to have 'that thing' even one more time. Meanwhile, the object of
your adoration has now become repulsed by you. He looks at you like you're
someone he's never met before, much less someone he once loved with high
passion. The irony is,you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out.
You're a pathetic mess,unrecognizable even to your own eyes. So that's it. You
have now reached infatuation's final destination-- the complete and merciless
devaluation of self." - pg 20-21
Elizabeth Gilbert
Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It
opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get
inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a
whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no
different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give
them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day,
like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love
takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the
darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a
glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the
imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-

you-apart pain. I hate love.

Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we
feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.
Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because
everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us;
because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing.
That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that
has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and
is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it
was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we
have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who
has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future
enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens.
And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad:
because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future
steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of
time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more
patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new
presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it
becomes our fate; and later on, when it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us
to other people), we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being. And
that is necessary. It is necessary - and toward this point our development will
move, little by little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long
been our own. People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion;
and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come
into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many people
have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them
that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to
them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at
the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before
found anything like that inside them. just as people for a long time had a wrong
idea about the sun's motion, they are even now wrong about the motion of what
is to come. The future stands still, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite
space.
Rilke Letters to a Young Poet
http://www.bustle.com/articles/124834-24-literary-quotes-to-get-you-over-yourbroken-heart-asap

Separation
BY W. S. MERWIN

Your absence has gone through me

Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your
chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and
mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so
that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid
person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask
for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your
life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out
and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be
just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not
just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-youand-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.
Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones
I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach
you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach
you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from
someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going
on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying.
They don't teach you anything worth knowing.
Things You Learn After Your First Heartbreak
Ryan O'Connell | Thought Catalogue
You learn not to assume things. You learn not to assume that the day you spent
together in bed and took photos of each other against that white wall was important
to both of you. In reality, only one of you will ever care about that day. Only one of
you will flinch when you see the white wall again. The other person will forget it ever
happened. Youll have to remind them, years later when you meet for coffee, about
the pictures and youll feel so stupid for holding it so dear. Why do you have to be the
one who remembers that day? You assumed that your memories would be the same.
You didnt know that one gets to forget and the other has to remember.

You learn that the person who once protected you from all harm could one day become
the harm. They could become the thing they spent so much time shielding you from.

Thats how it always seems to work though, doesnt? We give people power over our
lives, we let them dictate the rhythms, and then we act surprised when theres
scratches.
You learn about the cruelty of time, the cruelty of fickleness. You learn that its possible
for the person who knew you the best to eventually know nothing at all. You counted
on them always knowing. You took solace in someone keeping score. But reliance is
the first thing to go in a break up. You lose the right to call someone. You lose the
right to ask how theyre doing. Imagine that. One day you had a VIP pass to their life
and the next, youre shut out completely. Theyll tell their grandma more things than
theyd tell you.
You learn how bad heartbreak can hurt. All of a sudden youll be relating to sad love
songs and feeling like such a chump. You listened to them before but never quite
understood why they had so much resonance with people. Then you realized that its
strictly for people whove dealt with the loss of love. To get the full effect of a Patsy
Cline song, someone has to take an emotional dump on your face. Otherwise youll
just be like Gee, this lady sure sounds sad!
Youll learn terrifying things about yourself. Most notably, the fact that heartbreak will
turn you insane and obsessive. It makes you irrational and cripplingly nostalgic.
(Your friends will even get fed up with you for a bit because youre so cray cray.)
Theres no real way to fix a broken heart other than time and sleeping with the next
person you could potentially love. It takes someone elses dick to get over the last
one.
Most importantly, youll learn that it will all be okay in the end. Just like time killed
your relationship, it will also be the thing that repairs you. Eventually enough time
will pass that youll have nothing left to mourn. Youll develop swiss cheese holes in
your memory about the relationship. All youll recall are occasional flashes of
happiness and feel grateful for it. You understand that this is just how life works. You
fall in and out of love with people until you land somewhere that makes sense. Youve
learned a new secret about life and people. You get it now.
Its bitter to know. Its better to know.
Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change
direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over

and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn.
Why? Because this storm isnt something that blew in from far away, something that
has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can
do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your
ears so the sand doesnt get in, and walk through it, step by step. Theres no sun
there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into
the sky like pulverized bones. Thats the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.
And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm.
No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it
will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you
will bleed too. Hot, red blood. Youll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood
and the blood of others.
And once the storm is over you wont remember how you made it through, how you
managed to survive. You wont even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over.
But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you wont be the same
person who walked in. Thats what this storms all about. Haruki Murakami, Kafka
On The Shore

I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me,

I did not leave him, he did not leave me,
I freed him, he freed me.
Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

it is
forbidden to love where we are not loved
Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

each hour is a room of shame, and I am

swimming, swimming, holding my head up,
smiling, joking, ashamed, ashamed,
like being naked with the clothed, or being
a child, having to try to behave

while hating the terms of your life.

Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

Some people think I should

be over my ex by now maybe
I thought I might have been over him more
by now. Maybe Im half over who he
was, but not who I thought he was, and not
over the wound, sudden deathblow
as if out of nowhere, though it came from the core
of our life together.
Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

If I could
choose, a place to die,
it would never have been in your arms, old darling
Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

as if languagelessness was a step up, in evolution, from the chatter of

consciousness.
Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

There Was an Old Woman Called Nothing-at-All,

Who Lived in a Dwelling Exceedingly Small;
A Man Stretched His Mouth to the Utmost Extent,
And Down at One Gulp House and Old Woman Went.
Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

And you couldnt say,

could you, that the touch you had from me
was other than the touch of one
who could love for lifewhether we were suited

or notfor life, like a sentence. And now that I

consider, the touch that I had from you
became not the touch of the long view, but like the
tolerant willingness of one
who is passing through.
Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems
lets part
equals, as we were in every bed, pure
equals of the earth
Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

He fell in love with her because I

didn't suit him anymore nor him, me, though I could not see it, but he
saw it for me.
Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems
tags: love-s-ending 4 likes Like
like the death of a crone in one twin bed as a child is born in the other. Have
faith, old heart. What is living, anyway, but dying.
Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

I've said that he and I had been crazy

for each other. But maybe my ex and I were not
crazy for each other. Maybe we
were sane for each other, as if our desire
was almost not even personal it was personal, but that hardly mattered, since there
seemed to be no other woman
or man in the world.
Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

I want to relearn the intervals, to

journey with a man among the thirds and fifths,

augumented, diminshed, with a light touch,
sforzando, rallentando, agitato, the usual
adores and dotes - and of course what I reaaly
want is some low notes.
Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems