Day 1: The Breakup

October 14th — 2:17 AM

I can't sleep. I don't think I'll ever sleep again. My brain won't stop replaying it. Her face. Her voice. The way she said “I don't think I can do this anymore, Alex” like she was reading from a script she'd practiced in her car. Maybe she had. Maybe she spent the whole drive home rehearsing the words that would end three years of my life.

I came home at 6:30. Normal Tuesday. Put my keys in the bowl by the door. Called out “hey” like I always do. She didn't answer, which wasn't unusual — sometimes she had her headphones in. I found her in the bedroom. Sitting on the edge of the bed. Still in her jacket. She hadn't even taken her shoes off, which should have told me everything because she was the shoe police in this house.

“We need to talk.”

And I knew. Before she said another word, I knew. There's this thing that happens where your body understands before your brain does. My legs went weak. I sat down on the floor — not a conscious choice, my knees just stopped working — and I looked up at her and I said “please don't.”

But she did.

She said she'd been unhappy for months. She said she felt alone in the relationship. She said she'd tried to tell me and I hadn't heard. She said she still loved me but that love wasn't enough. She said a lot of things and I heard all of them and none of them because everything had this underwater quality, like she was speaking from very far away.

I said I could change. I said I would change. I said tell me what you need and I'll do it, anything, everything, just please don't leave. And she looked at me with so much sadness — not anger, sadness, which was worse — and she said “I needed you to do it without me having to ask.”

She packed a bag. She said she'd stay at her friend Rachel's. She said we could figure out the logistics later. She said she was sorry. She walked to the door and she turned around and she looked at me one more time and I could see that she was crying and some small, desperate part of me thought: she's changing her mind. She's going to drop the bag and come back.

She didn't. The door closed. And now I'm here.

I called her twice already. She didn't pick up. I texted her “please call me” and then “I'm sorry” and then “I love you” and she texted back “I need some space, Alex. Please.”

Space. She wants space. There is so much space in this apartment right now it's suffocating.

It's 3:40 AM now. I tried lying down and my heart started racing so fast I thought something was wrong with me. Like, medically wrong. I almost called 911. I didn't because I imagined them asking what was happening and me saying “my girlfriend left me” and them looking at each other and thinking: that's not an emergency.

But it is. It is an emergency. My whole life just imploded and nobody seems to understand the scale of it. My mom would say “you'll find someone else.” My friends would say “her loss, bro.” But it's not her loss. It's mine. It's entirely mine.

I keep looking at her toothbrush in the bathroom. She left her toothbrush. Who leaves their toothbrush? Is that a sign? Does that mean something? Am I reading into a toothbrush right now?

Yes. I am reading into a toothbrush at 3:40 in the morning because I have lost my mind.

4:15 AM. I need to write down what I'm feeling because if I don't put it somewhere it's going to eat me alive.

I feel like there's a hole in my chest. Not metaphorically. I can physically feel it. This hollow, aching space where something used to be. And the worst part is that I keep reaching for my phone to tell her about it — because that's what I do when something big happens, I tell her — and then I remember that she's the something big that happened and there's nobody to tell.

I don't know how to exist without her. I know that sounds dramatic. I know people survive breakups every day. I know that in a week or a month or a year this will look different. But right now, sitting on this kitchen floor at four in the morning, I genuinely don't know how to do tomorrow.

I have to go to work in four hours. I have a meeting at ten. I have to pretend to be a functioning human while my entire world is in pieces. I don't know how people do this. I don't know how people survive this.

I'm going to try to sleep. I probably won't. But I'll try.