3 Things We Cry About After a Break-Up

No matter how many relationships have ended in your life, no one gets used to breaking up with a partner.

It affects us physically. The feel-good hormones are reversed. It brings pain to the chest, as if a strong punch was just delivered.

Our emotions go on a spiral. When we’re lucky, we bow in gratitude for the good days, yet, the bad days outnumber them.

For every woman whose heart was broken — including me — I wrote this for you.

1. We mourn over the past.

This is what happens after a relationship ends.

We cry. We let the tears fall without a care.

We cry about the past. From the memories made, the trips planned and taken, to the words we regret saying.

We reminisce about the times we tried to lift ourselves out of pit but couldn’t, and ponder on mistakes we committed.

“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.” — Pablo Neruda

We cry when we recall the shows and movies we watched together, when we held hands and watched each others’ reactions.

Did she find that joke funny? Was she into zombies? Did she listen to the soundtrack of our favorite movie?

We cry when we listen to the songs we sent one another. The first time we met his mom, with our hands shaking, eager to make a good impression.

Did I wear the right dress? Should I have asked her if she needed help in the kitchen?

2. We go through the loneliness of the present.

Suddenly, reality tells us he is no longer around. His heart and mind are now somewhere else, someone else’s.

We wake up in the morning for work only to face another day without a hand to hold. Before we sleep at night, our thoughts fill with images of his kind face when his soft hands hold ours, the soothing voice we choose to turn to in distress.

We long for the calls and messages we no longer get, the coffee date we no longer have access to.

3. We only see a bleak future.

We cry about what’s ahead, the decades we saw happening before our eyes but vanished in one day.

The holidays we will no longer spend together, the children we will no longer bear, the home projects we will no longer plan for.

There will be no recounting of our children’s birthday parties, no more gray hair to worry about.

There will no longer be stories of the last five years while on the deathbed.

Eventually, we stop. The tears stop falling and we learn why they fell, and what they meant to us.

We realize the separation was not meant to break us, but to teach us and to push us toward a different path.

“To weep is to make less the depth of grief.” — William Shakespeare

We figure out the puzzle slowly. There are still no guarantees of certainty. Sometimes, the strength to live through day after day is enough.

The tears have washed us — the unforgettable past, the present, and future — clean.

Odyssa is the author of Like A New Sun Rising: A Collection of Poems on Love and From Where I Stand: A Collection of Poems on Travel.

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