“I’m not good with my words like you are,” he said to me, standing sheepishly on the road that separated our houses, four days after he’d dumped me and half an hour after I’d sent him an email blaming myself for everything. “But that was … that was … yeah,” he added, nodding, referring to what I’d written.
“If you break up with a writer, expect at least one letter, and if they’re lucky, at least one published essay about it,” I later wrote in my journal, hoping I would use it in a later essay, which I hoped would get published later, perhaps once I finished crying, though I wasn’t sure when that would be.
We were neighbors for two years and partners for just over one. He ended it on New Year’s Day. I cried every day until February, unable to stop myself from noticing things that would set me off: his car in the driveway, his car not in the driveway, his sheets on the line, him walking his whippet, Lola, on the road beneath my bedroom window or stooping to pick up her shit. These flashes of him were proof he was going about his life without me.
We first met during COVID-19 restrictions in Australia, where I live. I’d been picking grass for my son’s guinea pigs in the walkway opposite his house, and he came out to introduce himself. I extended my right hand to shake his while my left one held the grass, then I felt silly for being so formal. But the walks we took soon after were like that too: masked, no touching, making polite conversation like characters in a Jane Austen novel.
There’s a backstory here. One that involves moving in a hurry when my son’s father was jailed, after an escalation of abuse toward me that hit its peak when he moved into a house down the road from mine. After fleeing, and when I met my new neighbor—young, sweet, with an exceptional ability for restraint—I’d thought of him as the perfect counterbalance to my unrestrained ex. This new guy was the surprise happy ending to a saga that had contained Thomas Hardy–like twists, turns, and hardship.
My sweet neighbor dumping me on the first day of the new year was a plot twist I hadn’t bargained for. I’d been out all night, at a friend’s party he’d refused to come to, and while busting a move to “Dancing Queen,” I’d suddenly realized how much fun I was having without him. My friend gave me a confetti popper for the countdown, and when I pulled the string, all that emerged was a puff of air.
When we first got together, I got so carried away with the story. It was intoxicating, the idea of fleeing my abusive ex, then falling in love with the boy next door. I’d play the scenes over and over again in my mind. From the meet-cute to the first furtive kiss by the backyard fire pit the night before lockdown, from the first dinner at my house, when I successfully made risotto, to the first time we said “I love you,” in my library, drinking vodka. It was so easy, so entertaining, to just swoop back to the highlight reel of our romance, like rereading my favorite book. Once, while sitting on the couch and mentally lingering over some past dialogue, my son asked me what I was smiling about, and I jerked back to reality, the messy house, and my parenting responsibilities.
“You don’t seem to want to be involved in my life anymore” is what I said to him on New Year’s Day. He agreed. He needed time to think. He broke up with me that night. After he left, I rushed to the toilet and vomited. It was a hot night. My son was asleep on the couch under the air conditioner. I staggered past him to bed, picturing myself, bent over in shock, with flecks of spew around my mouth. The drama of it all.
I was really grieving, though. It was my first proper heartbreak. I was 38 and had always been the dumper, not the dumped—though, really, the only previous sustained relationship had been with my son’s father, and I’d had to move hours away just to be rid of him. I was used to scraping exes off like stubborn barnacles. I wasn’t used to anyone, and especially not the first person I had loved, just saying “nah.”
I suppose I had believed, arrogantly, that I was in control of the narrative. Yet I’d felt things slipping toward the end. I’d felt him drifting away, becoming less and less interested in the things I had to say. Once, when picking grass, I’d heard his front door slam—a hurried decision to avoid me, I realized with a pang. How things change.
We had coffee at his house the day after the breakup. He told me he had been struggling with my “distinct lack of optimism.” I did not think breaking up with me would help that. Yet I knew exactly what he meant. I couldn’t explain my recent drop into darkness, or the feeling that a heavy blanket was slowly suffocating me. I had been hoping, maybe, that he’d be the one to rip it off me, though violent acts of any kind are not in his character. I walked past him to carry my coffee cup to his kitchen and poured the dregs down the sink. He hugged me before I left, and as I put my shoes on outside, I glanced up and saw him standing on the other side of his glass door, tears streaming down his face, as if he were seeing me for the last time.
Of course, we ran into each other frequently. Picking grass, going to my car, taking a walk. I tried to bump into him. I tried to avoid him. I shut the blinds. I opened the blinds. I tried all the things I could think of to manage living in a house that overlooked his. My bedroom in particular gave me a view directly into his front yard and his kitchen window. We used to joke about me spying, but now I desperately wanted not to see. I stopped bursting into tears every time, but the stab of pain often lingered.
Music and alcohol made me wallow. The only good distraction was reading. I read and read and read, voraciously devouring characters I could relate to, book after book after book, in the backyard hammock, rocking myself in the sunshine. Once, he appeared through the gap between my shed and fence with Lola, who was in the habit of visiting, leading him toward me. I swung my legs over the side, closed the book, and got caught up in the blue of his eyes. I made restrained small talk while resisting the urge to go over with him, again, why things hadn’t worked.
My psychologist told me that we attempt to rewrite our past relationship trauma with new relationships. I’d wanted him to read my trauma and to help me rewrite it. But that wasn’t his job. That was no one’s job but mine. I’d been stuck in a dark spiral of unfulfilled needs until, finally, on New Year’s Eve, I had busted out of my rigid script without him. When I came back home on New Year’s Day, we had realized, though he would admit it better than me, that it was dragging us both down. My letter, written while still in the depths of grief, had been my attempt to acknowledge this.
We started taking walks again a few weeks after the breakup. It felt familiar, and better than randomly running into each other and not knowing what to say. We slid back into planning time together. Hope flared and died and flared and died until I didn’t know what to hope for anymore. We talked about feeling conflicted, yet appreciative of this new vibe between us. Untitled, it felt as if we could finally be ourselves. We were works in progress. I was no longer a depressed abuse survivor with an insatiable, impossible need, but Alex, a woman learning to rely on herself again. He was no longer my sweet savior who would make everything better, but James, a character in his own right, with his own backstory and his own fight.
The other day, I was pulling clothes out of the washing machine when I glanced through the laundry window and saw him. He was standing on the dirt road, chatting with another neighbor. I studied his figure, his head tilted in conversation, Lola by his knee. He could be talking there for ages, I knew—one of the things that used to annoy me was his ability to engage in endless small talk. I lingered a moment, savoring his posture, the minor hand movements, and the rise and fall of his voice, a cadence I recognized even without being able to distinguish the words. I bent and lifted the washing basket, hooking it on my hip and carrying it through the house to the clothes horse, letting longing tug at me however it liked.
I appreciate the pain now. It’s a reminder that what we had was not entirely fictitious. My biggest fear is to catch sight of him and feel nothing at all. The best stories, after all, have the authenticity of real emotion. But maybe when it comes to love, we aren’t always in control of what happens next. Maybe I’ll move away again or just move on. Maybe we’ll get back together. Maybe not. What feels most important is to release him from the ridiculous expectation of following my script, and to release myself, too, from my obsession with writing it.
