It is a psychologically uncommon approach to "breaking up" - typically an enemy structure is how you do that, the ex becomes your enemy.
Everything/everybody so assumes that - and thus cheers you on to "win" by hating him/her before you've said a word - that it seemed to me the only way forward for me was to take the subject off the table entirely.
And replace it with this. Writing here. I gave myself a grief ritual. And moved on that way.
But nothing stays the same that is Alive. Other griefs piled up. Writing became more and more and more, shattering into all kinds of it. An actual person emerged from the cemetary, upending my "resolution" and most of my assumptions about who he'd moved on to be in the real world. Stadium lights came on, blinding until my eyes adjusted over and over and over, and not especially flattering in the mirror(s).
...compared to a man actually here to deal with, *nothing* really is a light relationship load.
An absent person occupies imagination. A present person occupies dishes, moods, money, schedules, socks on the floor, sickness, sex, compromise, silence, all of it.
My "relationship status" is emotionally heavy but logistically featherweight.
I don't gotta do jackshit but sit here in my underwear smoking weed and writing crazyass stories and feeding them into a bot until I discover something like that: What if I prefer half-widow? Wait, what if I have preferred it for years?
I mean, take today. I am almost out of weed, so if I want it I'll have to go get it myself, I can't send Grief Beard on errands. But the store is like 5 blocks from here, it can be my exercise.
I also don't have to wonder what anyone else wants for dinner (kraut spaghetti, it's already in the oven Adirondack style).
I can treat myself to Barolo or not, don't have to worry about triggering anybody, and have it delivered, no gratitude required just a gratuity.
If I push this idea just 🤏 much:
... she decided a life-size cardboard cut-out of him would be perfect. Like they have of movie stars in theater lobbies. She remembers kinda wanting to take home the one of Wolverine. They make them at kinkos, no problemo.
Imagine her moving it around the house. Breakfast table. Movie night. Talking to it while dancing in the kitchen cooking. Not explaining it to guests—she only accounts to herself, pointedly. It becomes both hilarious and devastating. Not because she thinks it's him. Because it's enough of him.
Until one Sunday, it isn't.
The whole sex thing throws a monkey wrench in it. For instance at 5 a.m. when her stupid phone wakes her up to worry about bourbon. Then it's weird when she jerks off to go back to sleep. He seems into it, but he's always smiling the same at everything, so that doesn't feel quite consensual. She has to get up and face the cardboard guy toward the wall. But then that feels mean.
Desire is inconvenient. Cardboard doesn't kiss back. It also doesn't throw cigarette butts in the garden or relapse. Or surprise her or make her giggle. It's perfectly behaved because it's perfectly absent. If he were present and perfectly absent at the same time, he'd be passing the butter. Can you put the concept of passing the butter together with dickbutter? (She hopes not!)
Once Sunday naptime rolls around and rain is in the air, she'll decide this isn't going to work out.
Now what?
Neither enemy nor dead, the new breaking up is recycling? She uses large cardboard as weed barrier usually, but she suspects that she already comes across too much as a woman who might bury her exes in the yard, she doesn't want to put out more of that energy. He's not going to fit in the recycle bin unless she cuts him up like Dexter or some shit, which is way more drama than she's up for or she'd have had a live guy this whole time. Leave him whole on the curb and watch out the window until someone nice-seeming picks him up and takes him home? That feels kinda like what she did do back in the day, and the evil wife took him home to pass her butter.
The cardboard guy had been remarkably easy to live with. But she could not stop wondering if they were ever really happy. (Why does she always have to make everything so complicated?)
