UPFRONT: IT HAD BEEN years since I'd felt it, and hopefully I'll never have to feel it again, but sitting in a cinema watching
(500) Days of Summerlast week, I had a flashback to the stomach- plummeting, gut-piercing, emotional lightning strike that once made me lose half my body weight and take up smoking: heartbreak. It's that moment when someone you love reaches their hand into your chest and rips out the stunned but stubbornly beating organ you had promised to their care, but for which they suddenly have no further use. It's every bit as painful and humiliating as it sounds, and everyone should experience it at least once in their life, if only to see the lows to which they too will stoop when love flees without warning.
I’m not talking about what happens when someone you fancy doesn’t fancy you back. Nor am I talking about that painful, guilt-seeped separation from a lover whom you no longer love. No, I’m talking about that blow-in-the-solar-plexus moment when the love of your life tells you, out of the blue (it’s always out of the blue, because you’ve been missing the signals for months now), that the white picket fence you had constructed around your future has been bulldozed, and you are being summarily banished to a lifetime of loneliness and Phil Collins songs.
Against all odds, I managed to make it all the way to my late 20s before I even knew what Collins was on about. But just like the measles, the later in life a heartbreak happens, the harder it strikes. I thought I’d been prepared by the mini buffetings taken in my adolescence, but it turns out that the despair occasioned by Peter Buckley’s emigration to Canada in second year was but a scratch on the sturdy surface of my youthful heart. It turns out that spending a school year staring at the back of his head in maths class didn’t actually amount to a relationship, and it’s hard to call yourself rejected if the object of your affection never acknowledged your existence in the first place.
Then along came Mr Heartbreaker, formerly known as Mr Right, a boyfriend with whom I’d been living in a foreign capital and who had returned to Canada (Canada! Again! How those pesky maple-leafed North Americans have trampled the way of true love!) for study purposes. The plan had been to reunite in Toronto, but four days after leaving, he dumped my sorry, smitten ass. Over the phone. I was floored. I had thought he might have been The One. Unfortunately, I was even more convinced of it once he suggested otherwise.
We all have our crutches at the moment of heartbreak. For Tom in (500) Days of Summerit is Jack Daniels and Twinkies. I turned to chain smoking. Camel Lights were all I lived on over the coming weeks, as I lost my usually voracious appetite. My dignity was quick to follow suit.
In the subsequent phone calls from the Dumper, I managed to argue him into admitting, in a weak moment, to a sliver of indecision. I was on it like a shot. I hightailed it to Canada so we could meet in person and – wait for it – he could dump me all over again, this time to my face. Ha! If that reconciliation plan of mine didn’t ever backfire. Now I was dumped and broke, having just forked out for a flight to Canada so that the man who had already rejected me could repeat the process in person. The ignominy.
In the weeks that followed, all I could do was mentally replay scenes of our relationship over and over, in movie-montage fashion, with Against All Odds on a loop in my brain. I dropped two clothes sizes. My curly hair went straight. I woke up with an unidentified feeling of dread at the pit of my stomach that would sit there, until I recognised its source, and then unfurl to take over my entire day. I wallowed in my powerlessness, clung to my moral high ground, and recast myself as a tragic heroine (albeit one who sounded increasingly like Marge Simpson’s sisters).
Yet, despite the fact that for weeks I could talk of nothing but the cursed Canadian, my friends continued to tolerate me. I remember Conor Pope of Pricewatch fame, the man who currently counsels the nation on how to save money, returning one of my desperate calls on his mobile phone to let me pick through my memories for several costly hours, without once mentioning the astronomical phone charges he was amassing as I wailed long-distance.
Another friend swore I would now be more attractive to the opposite sex for having my heart broken, while a third promised that one day, when I met the one who was really The One, I’d be thanking my lucky stars that my heart had been chewed up thusly and spat in my face.
But the only thing that made it all go away was time. An embarrassingly long time involving weeks of denial, several embarrassing indiscretions, and some really bad music. But the day did dawn where I could stomach breakfast again, and at least when it did, I was able to look back and know that I had given it all I could, lost every shred of pride and all of my savings to find out definitively, absolutely, no question about it, that this man did not want to be my boyfriend any more. I finally moved on, without any what-ifs to leave me wondering. Case well and truly closed.
It was not to be reopened till I watched Joseph Gordon-Levitt wander around in a bathrobe in a heartbroken daze. This was a reminder that I’m glad I know how he feels. Not that I want to go through it again: I don’t think my lungs could take it. But something about getting royally rejected made me understand more about being physically, feelingly alive. That’s heartbreak for you: it can even be a blessing in the long term. You might get a decent screenplay out of it, if not a column. Blame Canada.