by Adam Ellis
When I was a kid, I figured everyone in their twenties had it all figured out. I was nine when my babysitter got married, and I remember how my mother and my stepfather had both warned her against the union. I never understood their wariness; I idolized the guy she was engaged to. I thought he was the coolest person I’d ever met. He played video games with me. He was a line cook in the college’s cafeteria, which I thought sounded so adult. I was too young to realize a grown man spending all his free time playing Super Nintendo with a child was pathetic at best and downright creepy at worst, and that his job made him little more than a glorified lunch lady. All I knew at the time was that he was twenty-four and awesome. A couple of years later he and my babysitter divorced, and over time I would learn that he’d been frequently unfaithful to her.
In the hazy moments after my breakup with Riley, it dawned on me that I was now roughly the same age my babysitter’s husband had been when she was first married to him. Though I had never been unfaithful like him, it was impossible to ignore my numerous faults in the relationship, and I drew parallels in my mind. I’d been passive-aggressive, manipulative, sometimes downright cruel. Frankly I’d been a shitty boyfriend, not unlike the way the man I’d so fiercely admired had been a terrible husband. In that moment, I felt the slow collapse of my childhood hero come full circle with the realization that I was now an adult, and not the sort of one I’d hoped to be. I thought, Nothing really changes. Nobody actually grows up. It was certainly a melodramatic thought to have, but breakups have that effect on people.
I walked home from Riley’s apartment in a dream state. I felt broken, confused, and ashamed. More than that, I felt scared, because I knew what was coming: the Breakup Breakdown. This is what I call the aftermath of a relationship’s demise. It’s a bastardization of the Kübler-Ross model with some tweaks and added stages, and it’s a bad enough process without the realization that your childhood hero was actually a flawed, fragile human being, and you just might be one too.
In the past, the Breakup Breakdown had been fairly cut-and-dried, a few weeks of moping followed by a gradual turnaround wherein I start dating again like new. This time, because it had been such a harsh and complicated affair, I dreaded the coming days and weeks. For once, I recognized my role in the dissolution of the relationship, and it was sobering. And yet I knew the process was inevitable, so I hunkered down and prepared for the worst. After all, I was already in the thick of it.
PHASE ONE: FLAT-OUT DENIAL
Floored as I initially was over my breakup, I wasn’t altogether surprised. I hate to do the dumping, so I avoid it at all costs. I tend to cling to failing relationships like a coyote gnawing on a rotting squirrel carcass, mostly because I can never find the right time to broach the subject of ending it all. There’s no polite way to dump someone, so I carry on with the crumbling affair, dying a little bit inside with each passing day. On occasion I’ll falsely convince myself that things are actually getting better, or that living a life of quiet misery is somehow noble, and just when I’ve resigned myself to a lifetime unfulfilled, I’ll get eighty-sixed by the other party.
Sometimes it doesn’t hit me at first. Since I’ve spent so much time in my own head analyzing the relationship, I forget there’s another person involved, and on more than one occasion I didn’t even register that I was being dumped at all.
Even after I’ve accepted that a relationship is de facto terminated, it takes time for the reality to fully sink in. I must once more learn to be single, and that can be a challenge. It’s like stepping off a ship and getting used to walking on land again. This time, I had to figure out how to sleep without my arm wrapped around another warm body. I’d pick up my phone to write a text, then realize the person it was meant for wouldn’t be responding. In my brain I knew it was over, and it wasn’t long before my heart knew it too, but the muscle memory associated with a relationship can take ages to fade. Phase Two of the Breakup Breakdown arises from this stubborn refusal to let go.
PHASE TWO: BARGAINING
I believe relationships succeed for one of a couple of reasons. The first is because of stupidity. I believe when two stupid people fall in love, they’re set for life. They’ll live out their years in idiot bliss, eagerly awaiting new Scary Movie installments and never voting. The second reason a couple stays together is through pure determination. My personal philosophy is that if something is broken, I should make an effort to fix it rather than abandon it, and this somewhat naive notion becomes extreme post-breakup. I hole up in my room like a recluse and frantically concoct wild plans to remedy my dead relationship. Reenact the boom box scene from Say Anything…? No, too easy. Cut off my ear and send it to my ex? Bitch, please, that’s been done to death. As the fantasies grow more and more outlandish in my head, I begin to lose my mind altogether, and I start having conversations with inanimate objects in my apartment.
After Riley dumped me, I briefly saw a therapist, and she told me my desire to fix things was because I’d feel like a failure if I let them stay broken. She told me that sometimes the braver thing to do is let go. I wish we could have explored that notion further but I ran out of money by session three and never went back. Still, it was helpful to gain that bit of understanding about myself, and I eventually accepted the fact that I couldn’t beg, wish, or trick someone back into my life. With a heavy heart I sulked along into Phase Three of the Breakup Breakdown.
PHASE THREE: DEPRESSION
I don’t know if there’s a worse feeling than knowing the person you once loved doesn’t need you anymore, to know they’re out in the world, living their life. My breakup brought a pervasive sadness that caused me to power down like a robot in stasis. I spun a figurative cocoon around myself and entered a sort of personal emotional hibernation for two weeks. I felt too petrified to do much other than sleep and take walks by myself. I found I couldn’t listen to music, as most of it would set me off. My appetite disappeared and I shed excessive weight from my already-skinny frame. Strangely, I stopped biting my fingernails, something I’d done since I was a kid. I can only imagine I did so in a psychological attempt to halt time, or delay dealing with my feelings. Most days I would lie in bed, watching comedies on Netflix, though never laughing. I let my work pile up, deadlines approaching, but couldn’t bring myself to care. Offers for freelance jobs came and went with no reply on my part. I played through the first two seasons of Parks and Recreation so many times that it became routine and the characters’ lines began to lose meaning. Rushmore, The Big Lebowski, and Clueless all received heavy rotation in my DVD player. I started to lose track of time and the days blurred into each other as I stared at the television, the jokes sounding flat and foreign to my ears.
My mom would call over Skype and I would try to act like nothing was wrong. She remarked once that I looked “like Jesus with a meth addiction,” which I suppose was her way of telling me she was worried about me. I was too embarrassed to open up to her or anyone else about my depression because I felt guilty for being depressed. I knew some people had real, chronic depression that never went away, and here I was sniffling over a breakup. I imagined some starving African child sitting on my couch, staring me down, and saying, “Really? Really? Eat a Hot Pocket and shut up, you diva.”
When my depression finally let up, it was more because I was tired of being sad than anything else. At a certain point being miserable becomes work. It’s easier than attempting recovery, so you actively bring up memories that will keep you depressed and you wallow in the pit of misery that you’ve dug for yourself. Eventually I acknowledged that I was purposefully prolonging my despair, so I turned off the TV and moved on to a different sort of destructive behavior.
PHASE FOUR: THE JENNIFER ANISTON JUNCTURE
Sorrow gave way to anger, and I began to rewrite the entire relationship in my head. It’s destructive behavior, but typically Phase Four only lasts a few days. (I don’t get enough protein to maintain the anger required to hate someone for long.) I rationalized ever
ything I’d done to be a justifiable reaction to something Riley did. I imagined my life as a movie, myself as a jilted martyr, and Riley a fool relegated to an unfortunate footnote. The audience would sob over how poorly I’d been treated. Philip Glass would score the music. He’d be nominated for an Oscar, but he wouldn’t win. He never wins.
Generally, it’s during this phase that I act the most erratic and immature. Case in point: After a breakup in 2005, an ex called me asking to pick up some stuff that had been left at my house. I curtly obliged, but when collection time came, I threw everything out the window of my fourth-story dorm room, aiming directly for my ex’s head. I’m not sure what was going through my own head to justify such an immature act. I figured it would make for a dramatic moment, but it just came off as childish.
Remembering the event, I could swear it happened in slow motion, like in an R. Kelly music video. I was nineteen; I’m not proud. Luckily, I managed to bypass that sort of behavior this time around. I suppose it’s because I’ve matured, or maybe it’s just that throwing sneakers and miniature TV sets out my window now would get me arrested.
After a few days of nasty thoughts projected in Riley’s general direction, I came to terms with the fact that such behavior was destructive and only barely self-serving. It would be wonderful if I could leap to this conclusion sooner instead of enduring weeks of wallowing in bed, subsisting on little else besides peach Go-Gurt and revenge fantasies. After more than a month of gloom and doom, I emerged from my self-composed cocoon with one thought blazing in my mind: I am fucking hungry as hell.
PHASE FIVE: EAT EVERYTHING IN SIGHT
Stress always causes me to lose my appetite to the point of having to remind myself to eat, and my breakup with Riley was no exception. When I finally began to recover, I had lost about eight pounds, an alarming amount for my already-noodly body. Had I stayed depressed, I would have been a perfect fit for the Paris runways. I could clearly see my rib cage, and all of my extra-small T-shirts fit like muumuus. When my melancholy finally subsided, it gave way to rabid hunger and I became a human vacuum cleaner, inhaling every scrap of food I could find.
After that, Phase Six was an easy transition.
PHASE SIX: NO, SERIOUSLY, EAT FUCKING EVERYTHING
I don’t know if it was the sudden influx of vitamins causing my system to reboot, but something seemed to click in my brain and I just stopped caring about being upset. It’s like when you’re on an airplane and it’s trying to descend through rough turbulence, and you clutch the armrests and pray it’ll be over soon, and then the plane lands and you let out a sigh of relief, and then that’s it. You turn on your cell phone and check your messages and forget the plane was bouncing around at all. My messy relationship and the difficult weeks following the split suddenly seemed so far in the past that I felt almost guilty for spending so much time indulging my anguish.
Carefully, I stepped back into my life. I turned on my iPod for the first time in weeks. I clipped off the mountain man beard that had overtaken my face. I ripped off each and every one of my fingernails with my teeth, and it felt incredible. I was ready for closure.
PHASE SEVEN: ACCEPTANCE AND RESOLUTION
Colors seemed brighter and the air smelled sweeter, though it was likely because my senses were dulled from eight straight weeks of staring at a television set, and I’m sure anything would smell sweeter than an unventilated room full of unwashed laundry. Regardless, I saw the world anew. Had a gaggle of forest animals joined me for a quaint musical number about how the heart can overcome, I wouldn’t have been surprised (remember, I imagine my life as a movie more often than not).
I felt like I’d come out of the woods, so to speak—albeit sparsely populated woods close to civilization. My woods were like the Central Park of wooded depression metaphors, but Central Park can be pretty scary at times (watch Home Alone 2: Lost in New York and tell me Central Park isn’t scary). Semantics aside, I was feeling better. Still, something troubled me. I finally had a modicum of clarity, and with it came a disconcerting judgment about my past with Riley. In bits and pieces, the relationship played out in my mind. I saw the actions of us both for what they were: mostly childish, usually antagonistic. After everything that had gone down, all I really felt was ashamed for how I’d acted. Riley hadn’t been blameless, but that was moot at this point. I knew I couldn’t change anything about the past, but I could make an effort to better myself for whoever would turn out to be Riley’s successor. That would become my driving force in the months that followed. I was aware I’d never know for sure if I’d improved until given a chance to test it with someone else, but realizing I needed to change was a small step in the right direction.
Step by step, I walked away from the memory of Riley and in the direction of a new, better me.
MAHALO, COME AGAIN
When sitcoms grow stale in their fifth or sixth seasons, the writers rely on a few tricks to reinvigorate the show and bring back viewers. Wedding episodes are always popular for some reason; or sometimes they’ll add a cherubic youngster to make sassy quips at the adults, most often when the show’s previous child actor has grown too old to still be cute. My personal favorite sitcom ruse is when the entire family decides to go on vacation. In the 1980s and ’90s this meant the cast would be filming on location and a laugh track would be added later on in production, creating a surreal experience of canned ghost laughter following the characters around whatever new locale they were visiting. It was creepy and I loved it. Plus it generally meant a two-part episode, separated by a wacky cliffhanger. I’m a sucker for cliffhangers, even if the twist is no more exciting than Michelle Tanner going missing in Disney World after being a bitch to her sisters.
After my breakup with Riley, I found that Portland felt a little claustrophobic. I was no longer pining for days gone by, yet I lingered in the midst of a funk I couldn’t shake. I felt like I was in a fishbowl; I could see the city, but I didn’t feel like I was really living in it. I was itching for a change of pace, to “clear my head,” as Anglo-Saxon children of suburbia so often lament. I decided I would travel, ignoring the fact that my bank balance was hovering somewhere close to zero. Fortunately, my credit card limit had just been inexplicably increased, so I set my sights on a trip. Uncertain of where to go, I opted to let the fates decide. I spun the plastic globe I keep on my desk.
With Plan A an abject failure, I racked my memory banks of world geography. I’m the first to admit that my knowledge of the world is limited. In my brain, all of Europe is stuck in a prewar sepia-toned state of gloom. Asia is mysterious and dangerous and full of dragons. Africa is the same, minus the dragons. Feeling like I was at a loss, I considered the American sitcom, as I so often do when it comes to making decisions.
On Friends they went to London, but I didn’t feel like leaving one rainy city for another. On Roseanne the Conners went to Las Vegas and Disney World. I thought, I don’t like to gamble and I’m a-scared of rides. The cast of Full House similarly took trips to Vegas and Disney World, but they also vacationed in Hawaii. I considered this, and suddenly it seemed like such an obvious decision. Hawaii. It was sort of exotic, but not tremendously expensive, and I remembered I had a friend named Park who had moved from Boston to Hawaii for work. It had been years since we’d caught up, but I figured it would be worth a shot to ask him if I could crash on his couch. I emailed Park and told him I was considering a visit to the island, asking if he’d mind playing host. Being the laid-back guy he is, his reply was, “Yeah, sure, whatever.” I booked a flight immediately.
The buyer’s high wore off pretty quickly when I realized I was going to have to get on an airplane in a matter of weeks. I always overlook this horrifying little tidbit when I travel. I can’t stand flying. Growing up it never bothered me, but several years ago on a flight from Boston to Montana I experienced some heinous turbulence that wrecked me for good. I remember it like it was yesterday. The flight had been smooth—almost suspiciously so. I was just about to bite into my t
welve-dollar turkey sandwich and enjoy the in-flight presentation of Beverly Hills Chihuahua when the pilot chimed in over the intercom.
The rest of the flight was not unlike a roller-coaster ride. The flight attendants belted themselves into their seats at the front of the aircraft, and it’s the only time I’ve ever seen a member of a flight crew look worried. The man sitting next to me began to hyperventilate and then passed out. When we landed, the pilot came back on the intercom and said, “Whew, we made it.” He sounded shaken.
Since that flight, I’ve never been comfortable in the air. The slightest bit of turbulence sends me into a tailspin of panic. Once bitten, twice shy, three times a lady, et cetera. Now it’s a struggle just to avoid having a nervous breakdown in the airport, let alone on the airplane, so I try to keep calm by occupying myself with little games. My favorite is Airport Bingo. It’s simple: Before I get to the terminal, I construct a Bingo card in my head of things one might see at an airport, and then spend the time before my flight seeing how many I can mark off. Sometimes I’ll construct a physical grid on a napkin or a scrap of paper. It’s like people-watching, only more judgmental.