I calculated how long it takes me to get over a man. I used data. only a decade, but it was enough. so now I can profit from the findings. finding 1: love is not a porcelain egg I am obligated to carry around forever. love is a truth bomb that I play catch with. and god is great; god is good to me — because now I know I’ll find bombs everywhere, in any city, and mostly when I’m not looking. in this video game, I lost all three lives by twenty seven. after the fourth life, I discovered that a heart is not such a precious thing, after all. there are infinite more hearts to lose.

finding 2: getting over a man is simple — you really only need two things: patience, and a high pain tolerance. both are things you can improve with age, and are useful for other endeavors — like starting a hustle. raising a child. climbing a mountain. it’s knowing how to eat the kind of nutritious shit that will end — where you cry because it’s so damn spicy — rather than the kind of junk shit that doesn’t. so I walked through darkness with hands outstretched, like a zombie, while time did its thing. now, I’m making it a part of my emotional workout plan: wake up in the morning and — no matter how smitten I am — remember that I am okay with dying alone.

finding 3: the formula, if you really want to know, is 1 over 6. as in: it takes me approximately the sixth of the total time together to get over a man. a six year relationship takes eleven months. three years, seven months. and so forth. by “get over” I only mean: for my mind-heart unclench its death grip, and find relief obsessing about something else. for my inner child to release her scarcity mindset about love — and to feel that there is no such thing as a waste.

perhaps the curse of the romantic mind is the feeling that heaven definitely won’t last, but believing that hell will last forever. so I live the good moments as poetry, and the bad ones I plot on a graph. I ask myself questions without answers, like: will falling in love always carry the intensity of an escape room — where the only way out is by suicide? are all unknowable feelings simply a function of time — and will they solve themselves, eventually? does freedom come from union, or from holding the entire universe of myself, by myself? both, I think; the answer was always both. now I show the work.

so I write the formula into my pocket, and then I fling my heart out from a slingshot, into that wild place. I remember that no feeling is final — and to accept loss and beauty forever. I let myself sink into that feeling of infinity — with a magic calculation as totem, as token, as numerical symbolism, to remind me — that life is never static. life is always moving; each moment, like a ray of sun on a glass shard. exploding and disappearing. here once. gone again.

jan 11 2021

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