It started with begging. I begged him to visit New York while I was there, to use his tax refund for a plane ticket. It’s a bit absurd in retrospect—an act of love? Desperation? Both? But he came. On his first day, we sat side by side in Tompkins Square Park, the kind of closeness that makes the world shrink. That night, we drank peach Amsterdam vodka with his impossibly cool friend in her East Village apartment. I got embarrassingly drunk, but the 2 AM trek back to Washington Heights felt like a victory march.
Then he left. What he gave me wasn’t heartbreak, but a reshaping of my reality. When we were together, I once dreamt I was trapped in my mind, fully conscious and unable to escape. He appeared out of nowhere, handed me a pill, and I woke up immediately. It was the kind of dream you tell people about, laughing nervously, wondering if it meant something. It did. After we broke up, the dreams came back, amplified and relentless. Every time I thought I had woken up, it was just another layer of the dream, a new version of the same prison. I became terrified to sleep, knowing I’d be trapped all over again.
He wasn’t in my life, yet somehow he still occupied it, like a bad tenant I couldn’t evict.
I was furious. Furious that someone no longer in my life was somehow still ruining it. His passive and aggressive reprimands left me anxious to even download a dating app, lest he find it and send even more messages. I didn’t just hate him; I hated the version of myself consumed by that hate. I was angry at my own foolishness, at how easily I had bent and reshaped pieces of myself just to be kept around.
My days became a highlight reel of rage. I drafted letters that I burned without satisfaction. I fantasized about revenge—maybe having a friend key a poetic insult into the side of his car while we were both conveniently at work. I lay awake crafting scathing monologues for the friends spreading his version of events…
But anger is a strange thing. It demands attention until one day, it doesn’t. I didn’t forgive him—not in any formal sense—but I stopped rehearsing my rage. The scripts, the letters, the fantasies of revenge—they fell away, irrelevant. What I’d thought was an unshakable grudge turned out to be just another phase. I left, and with distance, I began to see him clearly: not a villain, not a hero, just a flawed person struggling under the weight of his own inadequacies.
Bent hearts heal in unexpected ways. They don’t return to their original shape, but they adapt, taking on contours that hold deeper understanding. He didn’t break me, but he bent me just enough to change my perspective. Love isn’t always about breaking and healing. Sometimes it’s about the shapes we take when we’re forced to bend, and the grace we find when we finally straighten up again.
Now? I don’t hate him. I don’t like him either, but the fire is out. If anything, I feel a little bad for him—not enough to text or check in, but enough to recognize he’s just another person trying (and failing) to figure it out. He didn’t break my heart, but he bent it, twisted it, reshaped it into something I didn’t recognize for a while.
Funny thing is, it’s still mine.
spring break 