Welcome To The Heartbreak Club

We have wine...

Four months before it happened, we were standing shoulder pressed at the MoMA, looking at ‘The Persistence of Memory’ by Salvador Dali. It was small, we had to really lean in, crane our necks, and strain our eyes a little.

“It’s not what I thought it would be at all,” I said to him. He agreed. ‘I thought it would be more impressive.’

“Maybe it’s because we’re comparing it to all the other works, the giant dick swings, the Lichtensteins, the sculptures I can’t make sense of. I can’t believe it’s real. I’m seeing it though, an actual melted clock, right here, nuts, looking at the paint strokes! You can see them. It’s quite… spectacular.”

He laughed because I’d never used the word spectacular before. And I hated myself, because I’d never said spectacular before. And though it was minimal, it was yet another indication, a tiny tap on my shoulder by an invisible force, that said: “Oh, honey. You’ve gone. You’ve lost all sense of yourself. Can you remember who you were when you were 26? You were fun, girl! Brave. Now you say ‘spectacular’ to impress a man you’ve loved for ten years, who you aren’t even sure likes you anymore.”

He laughed and walked with his hands behind his back, holding a leaflet, moving through the art, which was now, in my anxious state, a kaleidoscope of colourful tunnels. He left The Persistence of Memory behind, along with me, and the words I was conjuring in what felt like endless, pitiful attempts to impress him.

The Persistence of Memory Salvador Dali

This is all true; I mean every word. This is about me, my ex-partner of ten years, and the four months before we fell apart.

This is an essay I’m writing – a series of essays – reflecting on the heartbreak, the healing, and as I sit now, with two iridescent tears budding at the corners of my eyes – the persistence, the terrifying, beautiful, Persistence of Memory.

I suppose before the real heartbreak comes, you know, the moment it happens, there are the recurring, minuscule daggers to the heart. Especially in a long-term relationship. Especially in mine. And I despair, because I can’t write about ‘the daggers’ or ‘the moment’ it ended without telling you about how it began.

But like really? Ugh, do I need to tell you about falling in love to add paint to the picture? Okay fine, but let’s make it quick. I was 22 when I met X — let’s call him X — it was easier than anything else I had encountered. Everything felt ‘right,’ which we told each other often. My head in the crook of his neck as we lay in bed, the laughs we shared over the same weird little thing, the way his eyes lit up when he was talking about music. The night we made spaghetti and danced barefoot in the kitchen. Just right.

And as you do when you meet someone with whom everything feels just right, I fell in love. Six months later, I was living with him in a shared house in Brixton, three years after that, we bought a flat together, a real ‘doer upper.’ Three years later we spoke about children and how we would raise them, and three years after that, we were standing in front of a painting in the MoMA like two strangers, both tired, unsure of what to talk about, snapping bitterly, sleeping top to tail in a hotel bed, moving around each other as though the other were coated in toxic waste.

There is not enough poetry in the world for me to read, for this obsolescence of our love to make sense to me. (But I will keep searching)

So now you know, I had it all mapped out. I had met the man, the right one; he was my best friend, and his family was my family. Then, he wasn’t. And they weren’t.

Four months before IT happened, X was away with work, and I, on reflection — with the damned persistence of memory — was a floating ball of wires, wires whose only function was to send the signal: Oh my fucking God, you’re a loser! through me like red lightning, over and over and over, until the ball of wires (me) combusted with shame.

Yeah, baby, we’re going there.

heh hard relate. Edvard Munch, Ashes, 1895

I tried everything, for the inevitable that I saw coming like a steam-train howling through the night, to swerve me. Cooking his favourite food. Making sure things were neat and in line to prevent arguments. Journaling about what might be wrong with me and ways I might be able to improve myself. Gym classes? A wildly successful career? Bigger boobs?

Relationships that are failing have this devastatingly profound effect on your psyche. Especially if you are anything like me: sensitive, new to this earth, and new to love.

This persistence of anxiety over my obviously failing relationship led to a ‘let’s make this work’ holiday. One where you try with all your might not to argue over failing to call the waiter over in enough time to get your cheque before making your next batch of plans. One where you vape secretly in the bathroom and get caught with a disappointed glare. One where you point to a tree and say, “I love cherry blossom” in a bid to make them remember that you are still the girl they fell in love with, and cherry blossom still moves you ten springs later.

Reader, you now know that the ‘let’s make this work’ holiday didn’t work. We returned, on separate planes from New York, my favourite city, back to London to talk on the sofa, about ‘breaks’ and ‘just a few months’ — hearts busted.

It was a cool morning in London, and the jet lag was a treacle we waded through in the little flat we had called home for the last eight years. We held hands, gasped through sobs, kissed, didn’t kiss, hugged, didn’t hug. And then he left, his suitcase packed. I watched the back of his head through my living room window, walking into a world without me. I waited for him to turn back. He didn’t turn back.

“We are just on a break,” I told people. Wait, that’s a lie.

“He’s gone. I’m going to die.” That's what I actually said.

“I’m dying.”

“I’m going to get a bottle of wine.”

“I drank two bottles of wine.”

“I woke up on my bedroom floor.”

And the strangest solution to my heartbreak: “I’m going to get some braces.”

New teeth will fix things. You can’t not love a girl with very, very straight teeth, right? That’s the science of love.

My usual method of survival — writing — was completely out of reach. I mean, “I’m dying so I guess I’ll get braces” doesn’t make for poetry. So I drank a lot. Until I didn’t. And then finally, after six months of waking on my sofa, confused, ashamed, the poetry came.

Thankfully, it was forced upon me by a looming deadline in January for my MA in poetry. But I wrote a few poems that were so lost, my tutor actually said ‘you tend to do this thing where you’re sad so you go ‘fucking, fuck, pussy, pussy this pussy that,’ in your poems because you’re afraid of what’s beneath it. Which is true. I mean the poetry that began to HEAL me finally arrived. I read a poem by Anne Sexton called Just Once, I cried my tired heart out. I thought about standing beneath a cherry blossom and looking across at the man I was losing, and the future child I was losing, and the family I was losing, and I cried, and I wrote.

Poetry always arrives like a soft hand.

Bless its soft little hands.

We reach for poetry at the most difficult times in our lives. Even those who say, “I just don’t get poetry, not my thing”, will scour the internet for an appropriate verse for a funeral, hoping a few lines might help them and others make sense of their grief. We pull our phone notes up when our worlds have stopped making sense and write a line or two. We feel the release of our human creativity and put our phones back in our pockets.

We have used poetry, since the beginning — before the written word even existed — to share stories, to warn each other, to connect. And poetry has survived because it is human. It has a heartbeat. A form. A memorable line that stays with you, like a face you cannot erase. Like his face and his heart, which I could not erase.

The Persistence of Memory.

The Persistence of Memory. Both astonishingly painful and radically healing.

At this time in my life, I was in astonishing pain and radically healing. And I can write now, on the other side of it, simply remembering and writing.

I didn’t get braces. Braces didn’t help.

But honestly, poetry did. I just had to really lean in, crane my neck, and strain my eyes a little. It was there. The hope, the future, smaller than I thought. I just had to learn, over the next year, not to compare it to anything else — and let it be. And, honestly? Getting there was kind of spectacular.

Just Once
After Anne Sexton

Just once I knew what love was for, 
a shock of pink blossom in Central Park
we stood beneath – as if prompted by growth
you said: and if we ever split up, 
I’d trust you with the kids. I nodded, 
and we’d cross that bridge, if we had to… then
we trudged with sore feet back to the hotel, 
where your side of the bed was immaculate
and mine —embarrassing. Wrappers, books,
lipsticks slicked down to the butt. That silence.
That nap we took top-to-tail, the distance
between us. Even then an ache. 
My tide dragged backwards. That silence showed me
what love was. Letting go. Keeping them warm
and held for a moment, while outside
yellow cabs carry hearts to bars 
and neons flicker, and you dream
of a big white airport

This is the beginning of a series — a kind of literary exorcism, a documentation of the heartbreak I couldn’t write about until now. But more than that, it's also about healing. About what comes after.

And that’s what I want to explore with others.

If you’ve loved and lost — if you’re mid-heartbreak, post-heartbreak, or just quietly holding the memory of something once dazzling — I’m running a five-week online poetry workshop called Heartbreakers.

It’s not therapy. It’s not just craft. It’s something in between. We’ll write through the ache, yes — but also toward joy, toward new language, toward poems that help us hold what can’t be held.

You’ll leave with five new poems, a community of kind-hearted writers, and maybe — just maybe — the kind of shift that only language can bring.

Event details HERE.

Comment below or DM me on Instagram for more details.

I love you all. Please look after those tender hearts in any way you can! Rest. Create. Write well.

Yours,

Charlie x