If You're Brave Enough To Love Her, Be Strong Enough To Get Over Her

I thought of eating a gun at one point. At a bunch of points, to be honest.

It's so hard for me to admit that in a way. I have three beautiful, young kids. I have family that loves me, or tries their best to love me. I play in a rock and roll band, and we just so happen to be one of the best bands that has ever existed.  

I have a lot of reasons to live. To keep on breathing and hurting and smiling and punching myself in the face, even in the crashing wake of being told by someone I loved that they simply don't love me anymore. 

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I drove around looking for spots to off myself. I wanted to use a gun. I wanted to punish myself for losing love, for losing the girl. And I wanted to make it forever.

It sounds so stupid on the surface but that's what can happen with heartbreak. You can drown. You can choke to death on your own remorse. You can confuse loss and pain with guilt and shame. And the worst part of all of it? It all makes perfect sense. Because when it comes to loving someone else, the rules of social discipline and responsibility are nothing but a brick wall for you to piss on.

People forget that. People who haven't been there are swift to judge heartbreak extremists. They label them:

He was selfish.

He was weak.

That Serge dude. Godd*mn he was so f*cking stupid.

But no. Love, even at it's very worst, is still intoxicating. That feeling of being linked to someone else, and them being linked to you, in the most ancient and true way possible, it's more powerful than all space and time. 

So it's only natural that when love dies, a part of you dies with it.

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Sometimes that isn't the case. Sometimes people move right along from one thing to another and they never feel so sad or dejected that they envision ending their lives. Not even close. But guess what? Those people were never truly in love. So f*ck them. 

***

There are tricks to getting over the person you once loved, I suppose, but I don't know any of them. Booze, maybe. Sleeping around with fresh blood? Newfound liberation in the form of your own place/one toothbrush instead of two/that sort of thing? 

I have no idea. I have found that moving on and "getting over" the person you were once brave enough to love, all in, is more difficult than it seems. It's kind of purgatorial in the Old Testament way, where long periods of what feels like forever go by and the same darkness, the same exact cyclic blues, keep hammering away at you, day in and day out.

It takes so long to recognize there is a way out. You get used to it all after awhile. You become adjusted to the sound of your own bones crunching down in the vises of torment. 

Love used to get you off. Even when it didn't, it still did. Maybe that's where you went wrong. Maybe that's where I went wrong? Who knows. But there was a time, not all that long ago, when I understood that I would never understand. 

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That period lasted like 18 million years. And it's still all over me like spiders.

But at the same time, I'm still alive. I still make my kids microwave popcorn on Saturday nights when I rent Ghostbusters or The Goonies from the Apple store on the TV. I still feel the twinge of lust rise up inside of my biology when I'm alone, when I see a beautiful woman right there in the Walmart pizza aisle.

I keep breathing, making coffee, smoking cigs, and changing diapers so dripping wet that I wonder how the hell I missed them for the last hour.

That's the strength right there happening. That's me moving on. No rhyme or reason. No system or method. Just a fool in the rain. Just a single dad with a dirty diaper in his hands. 

The trick, you see, is that there is no trick. 

***

There's so much written about how to be strong and feel better these days that you could start reading that sh*t right now, right this very second — scrolling down through the endless scroll of "power of positivity" articles slamming themselves up into your phone, 50 per second. You could read them for the rest of your natural-born life, and you would never ever get through them all.

Your brain would pop and flicker out before you'd conquer all that hot air. Your heart would stab itself with your final breath. Your eyes would dry up like potato chips and your nostrils would fill with blood that started pooling back behind your face long before you could ever possibly read all the words attached to all the clicks designed to fix you up right then and there.

You would die the worst death possible just from trying to make yourself happy again. Isn't that weird?

***

I will move on. I'm moving on as we speak. So are you. But only in the ways we have to move on, in the ways we are forced to drift away from old love merely because the unconquerable tides are pulling us out.

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That's the only thing we can fully depend on: Time. We have to be brave enough to trust in it. To know that it cares for us at least a little bit simply because of the dumbass fact that we're both still here. 

I didn't blow my skull wide open. Neither have you.

That's a thing, you know? It takes galactic strength to stay. It takes galactic strength to leave, too, by the way. But they're two very different things, obviously, and I write for the living because they're the only ones who read. Or pay. 

So what then? You got your heart broken and you want to feel whole again? Or you broke someone's heart and you want to shake the heavy chains that come with that? Do what you gotta do. Hurt like hell for as long as you need to. Try to not be a major dickhead if you can help it but there will be times when you have to be a major dickhead, so there you go. 

Your strength lies in each passing hour, each day floating away from you.

The ether of my darkness has been a pain in the ass. It feels like I've been sucking on a tailpipe since the day I was born. But I haven't. Not even close. 

I'm a badass, a Gladiator, a survivor just by surviving. I didn't even have to do anything. I only kept on living. Same as you. Same as you did. Or will have to do in time.

So, yeah. Buy me a drink when you see me. We can toast all this beautiful strength we never saw coming.