Heartbreak.
Real, searing, pulling, ripping, burning heartbreak. The kind of heartbreak that affects every part of your body. It makes your head hurt, your legs sluggish and your arms feel too weak to even pick up the giant spoon of icecream and chocolate sauce – so that you almost just end up burying your face in it.
I’ve never actually had a triple bypass or open-heart surgery or anything like that – but that’s exactly how I felt. I felt as though someone had opened my chest and pulled out my heart leaving in it’s place a gaping hole that no matter what I did, could not be filled. And the worst part was that I had no idea what could fill it other than Damien.
That was my life for those first months anyway. The days blurred into night and the nights blurred into the endless, hot summer days that surrounded us and brought me no joy. Luckily my dad was also my boss, so he gave me some much-needed time off.
For the first few weeks I was a complete disaster, a basket case to top all other basket cases.
I did nothing but mope around my apartment like a depressed sloth that had been anesthetized. I barely moved off of my couch where I lay eating and watching the Reality Channel and old reruns of Dynasty, so much that I came to rely on my daily dose of dramatic Joan Collins with big eighties hair. I think the only time I actually laughed during those first few weeks was when I watched the episode in which Joan Collins’ character Alexis attacks and pushes Krystal Carrington into the fountain and the two engage in an aquatic fight of all proportions. If this was the highlight of my life, I was worried for myself. Very worried.
I also lay in my bed reading romance novels – not the best idea in retrospect; my tissue bill had never been higher. I wept into my pillow and saw Damien’s face every single time I closed my eyes. During those black days I also didn’t shave my legs – and I am embarrassed to admit this – but didn’t shave my under arms either. Eventually Val and Sue staged an intervention of sorts and burst into my apartment late one evening, wearing their full-body biohazard suits, gas masks and spraying anti-bacterial liquid at me, dragging me into the bath where they forced me to scrub, shave and to wash my hair. I wept the whole time- it was all so dramatic.
I must have driven them mad with the late nightly tales of woe – Damien this, Damien that, Damien the next thing. But they listened. They nodded, they held my hand and they wiped my tears. God, I have the best friends in the entire universe.
As usual my family was also supportive; my sister-in-law offered to sue Damien (this was her solution to most things in life, and I know it comes from a good place, but it’s rarely the answer), James offered to hook me up with some ‘awesome dudes’ he knew from the gym. Stormy also offered to set me up. She was convinced that a sexy one-night-fling would get Damien out of my system – ‘The best way to get over someone, is to get under someone new.' And now that Stormy knew I had lost my virginity- finally- she was of the opinion I should rack up some notches on my bedpost. Even my mother seemed concerned, well as concerned as a self-obsessed narcissist can be. She insisted I go to Esmeralda, or her new hypno-regression therapist, who she had recently started seeing and who had taken her through her spiritual birthing, or some such crap. But strangely enough, it was Adam who finally slapped me to my senses and dragged me kicking and screaming out of my black hole of dirty, hairy depression.
“You have to snap out of it Lilly!” He actually shouted at me one evening. I think it was the first time I’d ever heard him raise his voice. “You have to get up, pick yourself up and carry on. I’m going to give you the number of a psychologist colleague of mine and I insist you go and see him!”
And so I did. I picked myself up one day and dragged myself out into the big, bright world that existed beyond the four walls of my apartment.
I’d never been to a psychologist before, Sue had gone to one after catching Matt in bed with that other woman and it had helped her tremendously. So at 4:30 PM on a Monday afternoon, almost one month exactly after returning home from Thailand, I found myself sitting in the waiting room of one Kevin Stanley, MD. I didn’t really know what to expect.
His waiting room was an interesting place, and if I didn’t know his profession, I might have guessed that he was an anthropologist or an archaeologist. Every corner of his room was decorated with some kind of an ethnic mask, or statue. There was almost too much to focus on, one item however did manage to catch my eye. It was a disturbing looking thing with slit eyes and long fang-like teeth carved out of a dark wood.
“It’s a North African voodoo dancing mask,” I heard a voice say.
I looked up to see a man that looked nothing like Indiana Jones, and who I assumed could only be Kevin himself, standing in the doorway of his office.
“It’s said to be a conduit which allows the spirits to journey into their ritual ceremonies.”
“Mmmm, interesting,” I said, not meaning that in the absolute slightest.
“Would you like to come inside Lilly?” he gestured for me to follow him.
The office itself was exactly like I would have expected; a large mahogany table dominated the centre of the room with a chair in front of it facing a large comfortable looking couch. Next to the couch stood a side table, very well prepared with a bottle of water on and a giant box of tissues. But by this stage I had no more tears to cry, unless I wanted to dehydrate and shrivel down to the size of a raisin. Kevin gestured for me to sit, and I did. And then he sat down.
And then there was just silence.
An awkward silence where he looked at me with a smile on his face. Was I supposed to talk now? I didn’t really know how these things worked. Maybe if I made myself comfortable on that couch the words would just start pouring out of me?
Finally he saved me from the toe-curling discomfort, “Do you know why I collect masks, Lilly?” He asked in a voice that you would imagine a psychologist to have. Soft, monotone and purposeful, as if each of his words was deliberately chosen to elicit a certain response in you, which they probably were.
“Um...” I looked at the walls and noticed that they were also covered in masks, “Because you like them?” God only knew why anyone would choose this form of décor – it certainly wasn’t to set his patients at ease, because I was now face to face with a gold, grotesque looking devil bird!
He shook his hear slowly and jotted something down in his note pad. I wondered what the hell he’d managed to extrapolate from that single sentence of mine, what psychological insight he'd gained?
“Because my work, Lilly, is all about masks Lilly. We all wear them, and it will be our job to find out what “Lilly’s’ mask is and to remove it, so that Lilly no longer needs to hide behind it.” He smiled a warm smile and jotted something else down. I mentally rolled my eyes, scoffed and sniggered – what the hell had my brother sent me to? I hated this kind of thing, this wishy-washy stuff that could neither be quantified nor categorized. And I also hated it when people used my name too liberally. What was going to happen next? Was he going to make me lie on the couch and discuss my earliest childhood memory and my sex life – or lack there of, which was undoubtedly where the problem lay, since I was no longer wrapped up in the arms of Damien- sigh.
“And now we need to find out what mask Lilly is wearing. And why Lilly is wearing it. What does your mask look like Lilly? And how we can take it off, so that we can reveal the real Lilly. So, please lie back Lilly and make Lilly comfortable and tell me Lilly about your first childhood memory… Lilly, Lilly, Lilly.”
Needless to say, I never went back.
Some psychoanalyst with masks on his wall who talked in riddles and overused my name was not going to help me. I walked out of his office that afternoon feeling very dejected and perhaps the lowest I had felt in a while. I didn’t feel like going home, but I didn’t feel like going anywhere either, so I just stood on the sidewalk for a while and watched the people go by.
I wondered how they all were? If they were happy, or if they too were miserable? Maybe some of them had just left therapists too? Had some of them had their hearts broken, had some just gotten back from their honeymoons; happy and in love? Had some just gotten divorced? As I watched each and every one of them walk past, some to their parked cars, some to coffee shops and some to meetings and maybe even home – it struck me that I had to start walking too. I couldn’t wallow in this anymore. Life went on. I would be okay. I would get over this and move on, even if it was one small step at a time.
So in that moment of clarity standing on the street corner, I put my head and shoulders back and put one foot in front of the other, albeit rather shakily. I knew what I needed to do to get on with my life. I needed to cut off all contact with Damien, because as long as the two of us were sending each other messages on Facebook and I was looking at his profile every two minutes, the longer it would take to move on.
But doing this would prove even harder than leaving Thailand. It was the severing of the last cord that tied us together, because every couple of days since I’d been back Damien would send me a message, nothing too hectic. Just a simple:
Hi,
Hope you are okay?
I’m in Vietnam now with Jess and Sharon.
Keep well,
Love
DX
But the messages kept me tied to him. Kept me desperately, hopelessly and devotedly in love with the guy that was a million miles away and totally out of my reach. So that evening, after a glass of wine to calm my shaking nerves and hands, I sent him one last message.
Dear Damien
I hope you are having fun.
This is really hard for me to say, but I think we need to stop talking to each other. It’s killing me. I’m not going to be able to move on and get over you if you keep sending me messages with the word ‘Love’ in and little x’s. I also don’t think we can be friends on Facebook anymore, because I don’t want to see your status updates and the pictures of you, it’s too painful. So I’m going to block you. I hope you understand.
I need to let you go now.
Look after yourself,
Lilly
I pressed enter and watched the message pop onto the screen with that all too familiar noise it made. I sat and stared at my screen, and there it was. And there was no way of taking it back now. I momentarily panicked and started pressing buttons in an attempt to remove the message from the conversation, but it was there to stay. I had actually done it. This was not something that the old Lilly would have done, and underneath the stomach churning pain, somewhere buried deeply under the emotional mush of my brain, I felt a little twinge of pride. I couldn’t believe I had done this.
I never heard back from Damien again. Not once. That was it. He was officially out of my life and now I had to systematically pick up the pieces of my shattered heart, yes it was that dramatic – and try to glue, or sellotape or sew them back together somehow, even if it was a temporary patch up job until I could find something that would fix it more permanently.
So I went back to work, I joined a gym and got a personal trainer – a scary looking body builder named Leonard who was an evil torturer – and then I did something that all girls do during a break-up, I cut my hair. No longer was I the girl with the long blonde locks, but I was the chick with the short pixie cut. Naturally I cried for the first two days after doing it, wishing I could find a time machine and go back and slap sense into the Lilly that had walked into the hairdresser so brazenly and said, “Cut it all off.” But after two or three days, I started to like it. It made me feel more energetic, if that makes sense, more perky and fresh. And everyone else liked it too, apparently I have the bone structure to pull it off, or maybe that was just their way of saying they like it, when they actually hated it and thought I look like a prepubescent Justin Bieber.
I started going on dates again after about six months. Well, at the time I wasn’t really aware that it was a date, thanks to the underhanded, conspiratorial ways of Sue and Val. We had gone out for a simple ‘dinner’ one night, but little did I know that they had invited one of future McDreamy’s friends. It was a surprise blind date.
Brad was his name. And he was perfect. He was a med student, he was ridiculously good looking; blonde, green eyes, big broad shoulders, a great smile. He should have been exactly my type – but I wasn’t attracted to him in the slightest. And to top it all off he was polite and funny and really interesting and intelligent. He wasn’t the problem. The problem was that clearly my taste in men had changed. I was no longer into Mr Clean-Cut; I was into Mr Black clothes, tattoos, and messy hair. Of course I had no idea where I would ever meet a guy like that again. I had no idea where that contingent even hung out. I had no idea where the cool, ironic bars were filled with hipsters, the creative ilk and men in skinny black jeans. But would I really like a guy like that? Or did I just like Damien?
I was confused. I barely knew what I liked anymore, and I definitely had no idea what I wanted. Six months ago I had wanted marriage and kids and a house with a manicured garden, a metaphorical white picket fence, two point five kids, a Golden Labrador retriever, and all the other things that came with sleepy suburban life. But now…I wasn’t sure. I went on a few dates with Brad, we landed up kissing a few times, but it was nothing like with Damien. I knew I had to stop comparing, but I simply couldn’t help myself. That’s the natural human way – it’s the way we understand everything around us, by comparing it to what we know and placing it in a little labelled compartment.
After Brad I went on a few dates with a guy that Stormy set me up with, Maxwell. He was an intense creative type who wrote nauseating poetry and had directed a short black and white film about a lonely computer who fell in love with the telephone on the desk next to him, the whole thing made no sense. He made no sense. We made no sense.
It was hopeless, no matter what I did; no matter how many aerobics classes I went to, how many hours I put in at work, how many times I cut and dyed my hair or redecorated my apartment and bought myself a new wardrobe, no matter how many self-help books I read or how many guys I went on dates with, or how many girls’ nights, I was still the same. I missed Damien so much it felt like a little piece of myself was missing. We hadn’t spoken for eight months and it had been excruciating.
But if I look at it holistically, I guess some good had come out of it. I was much more independent now, not as reliant on my friends and family for support. I often went to movies on my own and could handle my own company for a whole weekend. I was alone and fending for myself in the world for the first time ever, and I wasn’t doing too badly.
Christmas came and went and the calendar ticked over into the New Year. I had heard that in that time Michael had shacked up with someone else, a girl that I had gone to school with. Actually, she had been a mutual acquaintance of ours, which of course sent Stormy straight into conspiratorial mode. She was convinced they’d had a little ‘thing-thang’ during our relationship – but then she was naturally suspicious and believed that the government was filming us all and that ancient aliens walked among us too. It didn’t bother me in the slightest though.
February approached and suddenly I was staring at the one-year anniversary of my failed marriage and the one-year anniversary of the painful break-up with Damien. I would have thought that after a year I would be over him, have at least moved on a bit, to the point that I didn’t think of him every day and look up at the moon at night wondering where on earth he was, what he was doing, whether or not he'd met someone else and had forgotten all about me.
It was clear by now - if ever I was in doubt about it - that Damien was true love.
I was going to drive myself mad thinking those thoughts as regularly as I did. But the closer I got to the one-year anniversary, the worse it got until I was seeing him everywhere: On the street, at work, in restaurants, one of the butlers on the reruns of Dynasty even looked like him, and the last straw, the prime cut of sirloin steak I had made for myself that evening also looked like him, in the right light. He was everywhere and I couldn’t stop myself from wondering when he was coming back to South Africa, he’d said a year, and that’s what it was.
And then one day, while sitting in a coffee shop reading yet another self help book, I caught the glimpse of someone familiar out of the corner of my eye.