One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

October was nothing short of a big terrible bummer.

My car was totaled in a Walgreens parking lot.

Matthew Perry was found dead in his hot tub on a Saturday afternoon.

The people of Palestine continued to fight for their lives.

And my heart was broken not once, but twice, at the hands of someone I cared about immensely.

If you’ve read Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, you know Matthew Perry spent much of his life trying to outrun himself.

His pain was everywhere. You could feel it on every page.

So when the news broke that he was gone, it was devastating, but it didn’t feel entirely surprising.

Some endings arrive long before we are ready to admit they are coming.

“And life went on. It was not the same, but it went on.”

As I was left to navigate a certain sad end of my own, I found myself fiddling with a new vocabulary word:

Betrayal.

Until then, it was a word I understood mostly in theory.

It turns out betrayal is whiplash.

A different kind of grief.

A strange experience of mourning something while simultaneously questioning whether the thing you are mourning ever existed the way you thought it did.

That might be the cruelest part.

It doesn’t just change how you see someone else after they let you down hard.

They let you down 6 ways from Sunday.

It can make you reconsider your own memory.

“What cannot be said, will be wept.”

— Sappho

Sometimes the people we least expect to hurt us are the ones who manage it most spectacularly.

Maybe because we handed them the sharpest tools.

Trust. History. Intimacy. The benefit of the doubt.

People can enter our lives with pure hearts and good intentions and still leave wreckage behind when they leave.

I used to think the important part was understanding why.

I’m less interested in that question now.

The unfair thing about wreckage is that eventually it becomes the responsibility of whoever is left holding it.

For a long time, I wasn’t particularly good at that part.

Heartbreak had a way of turning me against myself. I knew how to self-destruct much better than I knew how to recover.

Now, I cope differently.

I take salt baths.

I floss my teeth.

I make small promises to myself and, more importantly, I keep them.

There is something surprisingly restorative about proving to yourself, in the most ordinary ways possible, that you can be trusted.

Maybe forgiveness begins there too.

Not in absolution.

Not in pretending something didn’t hurt.

Just in deciding you don’t want to carry it forever.

“It was her habit to build laughter out of inadequate materials.”

— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Rejection has always had a way of finding the oldest bruises in me.

So this end had me doing some accounting.

How much of this have I earned?

How much longer until my debts are settled?

At what point does the universe consider us even?

I’ve spent most of my life hoping for the best while quietly preparing for the worst, as though anticipating pain might somehow lessen it.

It never has.

I’d still like to live in a softer utopia where every relationship ends gracefully. Where people who once loved each other can simply shake hands over the wreckage and wish each other well.

Maybe sometimes they can.

But I’m not quite there yet.

So, for now, I’ll keep hanging out with myself until I feel like me again.

“Let us forget, with generosity, those who could not love us.”

— Pablo Neruda