It's Not My Jam

I've been reading my friend's recently published book over the last few weeks - and yes, it's taken me weeks since it's been a struggle for me. It's a story about heartbreak, specifically her own after the break-up of a six-year long-distance relationship. One of the reasons it's been a bit of a slog for me is that I knew her partner (although I only met him a couple of times, and both times at parties) and, more importantly, I had to experience the split through her eyes - and through drink-soaked evenings at her local pub at the end of her street that revolved around her lamentations on a lost loved. I know much of the story already, and it was tough and tiresome for me to experience the first time around. Having to relive it, well, maybe I just don't have the requisite stomach for it. In the end, the book is not meant for me. I'm not the intended target audience. Truthfully, she's trying to reach but one person: her ex-beloved, who she thinks will read this memoir and come to his senses and come back to her.

But it does have me pondering some of my own heartbreaks. After all, in my friend's book, the one reference she makes of me is scoffing that her heartbreak is more devastating than any of mine. We've all had them, if we've lived a proper live. (Even my good friend DC, who has carried the curse of being attracted to "unattainables," has had to deal with the heartbreak of unrequited affections, which might be the worst of all.) Like many, my first experience with heartbreak was early, in grade 8. I was so smitten with her, Allison (I had to google to see if her name had one l or two), and a mutual friend introduced us formally at a school dance. She looked at me with some disdain, and walked away. And crazily, even though we went to the same high school for five years after that, we never once spoke. I still admired her from afar, but it remained that way through my teenaged years. I'm pretty sure I saw her at one of my local coffee shops when I was in my early 20s and living in my tiny bachelor apartment in the Annex - we share a mutual friend and she's confirmed that Allison has lived her whole life in Toronto, and in fact now lives somewhere in the same neighbourhood - but that's been it. Would I today have the courage to say hi if I saw her on the street? Hmm, good question. She was the first of a number of unrequited (and, let's face it, harmless) heartbreaks early on: Lauren, Lee, Arianne ... hmm, there are probably more, but maybe it's best if they've been relegated to the deepest recesses of my brain.

I experienced heartbreak for the first as an adult when my relationship with AE ended. We had been together for only a year and it began under straining circumstances: an affair she had with me when she started back at work after her maternity leave. In fact, I was her six-month replacement while on leave and sat at her desk! (She ended up landing a different editorial position so I was kept on.) We had such an easy chemistry, had a similar sense of humour and sensibility, and we were both feeling alone: I was single and lonely, and she felt a bit lost in her marriage. Timing is everything, but breaking up a family is probably not the ideal way to begin a relationship. Still, it worked for a good long time (a year does seem like a long time when one is in their mid-20s) but I was also thrust into a "grown up" role (since she had a young daughter - worse still, she had to be in a cast for a couple of months to realign her hips) that I was not prepared for. It finally ended somewhat dramatically when we got thrown out (for reasons that are too difficult to explain concisely) of the SkyDome during a Blue Jays game. I remember her being angry and just walking away from me. This was not the first time she walked away like that, but it was the first I didn't follow after her, but instead just let her go. It took me a long time to recover from her - it didn't help that we still worked together (although thankfully she found another job a couple of months later) - and I was still lamenting her a full year later when I was in France for a couple of weeks in the summer to attend a wedding. But in time, the hurt started to subside, my fragile emotional state was on the mend, and I recovered. I still feel a pang when I see her (not very often) but I feel I'm better for the experience: not just the deep love I felt for her (the deepest I had at that time; I still retain a muscle memory of holding her body one evening in my apartment in the Annex, marvelling at how we just "fit"), but also for demonstrating the flip side, of missing a person so desperately. And for showing me that an emotional scar is not necessarily a bad thing to carry around.