How To Cope Right After He Leaves You

Two minutes after he has walked out that door, everything inside you threatens to shatter. Not just your heart, that has been broken for some time now, forgotten and covered in dust inside your chest, everything else. Your soul feels like it is ten thousand miles away, your lungs are heaving as though all the oxygen in this room has left with him, you don’t know how your body is holding you up because everything hurts, everything aches like his goodbye has chewed through your organs, and although scientifically speaking you are fine…you feel like you are dying.

Because that is what breaking up is. The death of a life that you once imagined with him, a grave appearing inside your head in which you bury your memories so they don’t hurt you. Your brain, whatever is left of it, is trying to focus of helping you live through this terrible event. This awful sadness that threatens to swallow you whole and spit out your bones. This is the hardest part, two minutes after the door has closed behind him for good. After this, every other time you miss him terribly will be nothing but a ghost of this completely consuming pain.

And this, this is how you are going to cope. You are going to cry. You are going to weep in a way that you will never allow anyone to see, not even him. And it will continue for what seems like an age. You will feel like you have aged ten years. But then, you cannot weep anymore and you will stop, unsure of what to do with yourself – you are so raw and hurt and still bleeding. But you cannot cry anymore because you see, your sub conscious mind has been scrambling this whole time, looking for a reason to stop you from falling apart; this is survival. And to help you, your mind will come up with this: drink water. You’re dehydrated from letting it all out, and you need to drink water.

So shakily, you will get to your feet, and you will go to the kitchen, pour yourself a glass of water, and make your way to bed. The tears will probably come again when you walk into a room that you named ‘ours’ has now become just a room you lose sleep in. You will remember how he felt sleep warm against your skin, his arms around you and suddenly the universe is broken.

Breathe deeply. Eventually you will recognise that this is your new normal, but until then, you need to understand that there is a difference between being alone and being lonely. And here is how you will learn.

From a glass of water.

Before you drink it, look at the water, look at it carefully. And although you want to see yourself yourself as broken, try to look past that at this. You are still here. You are still breathing despite this constricting pain in your chest that threatens to destroy you. Instead of seeing yourself as broken, see yourself as the water you have poured into that glass. An ocean, a river, a sea, even a pond, they all have this one thing in common. No one can break them. Because it is physically impossible to break water. Because water adapts, it takes the shape of the vessel it has been forced into and it does so easily – that’s where we get the adjective ‘fluidly’ from.

You are seventy percent made of this stuff. And although you don’t feel invincible right now, keep this inside your mind. You will heal from this, you will recover because you are made out of oceans and they have survived volcanos erupting under their surface and hurricanes stealing from them and becoming terrible storms. They have survived human beings destroying and polluting their purest depths and they are still here. They still move entire continents apart with their sheer force and pressure.

Think of him as a hurricane, and your pain as a volcano. He has taken from you and gone. And your pain is erupting inside you. But even hurricanes and volcanos have a point where they end, and so will the memories of him that haunt you and your pain.

But you my dear, you are an ocean. And oceans are ancient and can survive everything, even the wrath of weather and planet. Just like you will survive losing what you thought would be forever love.

Preorder Nikita Gill’s Your Soul Is A River from Thought Catalog Books here.