The Death of a Star: When Loving Someone Is No Longer Viable

Take a listen while you read. TW: I briefly touch upon emotional and physical abuse. Please seek professional assistance if you find yourself in any type of limiting or unsafe situation.

There’s a brief moment where everything splinters. When the love that you held for someone (or something) is ripped apart so violently that it’s flung out haphazardly into your inner-most void — and just as violently, it diminishes.

Usually, there are many moments that lead to this devestation but there’s that one particular happening. Something that annihilates any notions you held so dear about a person you held so dearly. And then, you go all supernova and your heart…collapses.

Indescribably and indefinitely, the light for them dims.

Maybe they left you on read one too many times. Maybe they conveniently “forgot” to invite you to their family’s family dinner. But then you showed up for an altogether different reason and found them all chuckling over chicken and mash.

Or, maybe they cheated on you. With Heather. From f*cking Promotions. Or, worse yet still, became abusive in some fashion.

They did something that broke the illusion that you were a star in their eyes. That you were… special. That they could be classified as anything other than a genuine light in your life.

And now the dust particles that once made up your sparkly little chest have all but been scattered and you’re left to (once again) generate a new baby star of a heart with the hope that this one won’t die.

There are those in our lives that are like small stars, dimming and cooling until the feeling becomes non-existent.

And then there are the red f*cking dwarves.

The massive swelling explosions that sever tendons and leave us bereft. The kind that keep both Ben’s & Jerry’s’ families* lapping their luxurious days away in ice cream-filled pools.

*Dear Ben and/or Jerry: Please feel free to provide me with copious amounts of Chubby Hubby. I too will swim in my peanut buttery filled pool of pretzel-laced heartbreak.

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The magnitude of such deaths only leave us with those pain-invoking questions. The questions that implicate us, that make us insecure and unsure of whether our little stars were pointing northward or not.

Were we duped into believing in the other person’s false sense of self, or were we ourselves misconstruing the facts that were flapping in our starstruck faces? Did we mask the who that they actually were in relation to the who we were in an effort to be the who’s we envisioned us being together? In other words, did we lie to ourselves? To them?

Yes.

And that’s okay.

It’s okay to give your mind a moment to catch up — to allow it to create the temporary parameters necessary to make sense of it’s new dust-spewn state.

We all need time to rebuild. To learn who we were before collapse and who we can re-make ourselves as after.

Each “dimming” teaches us a bit more about how to maneuver around and through the fields of broken bits. And, if we allow, we can become stronger stars that warm those around us — providing guidance in the deep, dark spaces where others may not have been.

The losses act as guideposts, showing us where we have been so that we never become lost again. Don’t fear the collapse. Embrace it. Cry through it. Mourn it. And re-form your shine.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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