It’s expensive to break up.

It’s expensive to break up.

For one thing, there are the trauma expenses.

Because I felt like I had been electrocuted, I paid $120 to an acupuncturist to stick needles in me, and torture me with twisty cups and herb plasters. Then I paid another $100 for herbs that are supposed to make me forget and able to love again.

That feeling of wending my way through the 95 degree metallic screechy city to get to his office, the sheets spotted with blood, his dirty uniform…my desperation…just to get to some sort of balance again. Actually, it did relax me, eventually, sort of: “relax your liver,” he said, “relax your gall bladder, relax your small intestine.”

Luckily the therapist is not too expensive: just a $20 copay. She takes my insurance! and is two blocks away! And, oh, she is very wise.

Found also a miracle bodyworker: $95 a session, well worth it. I will do that instead of the scary acupuncture.

Another $20 copay for the doctor who wrote me the Ambien prescription ($10). The Ambien let me sleep one night. The next night I took it and woke up with the wildest palpitations like a flurry of bats in my chest. So I stopped the Ambien. Kim told me that even if you can’t sleep, just sort of horizontal resting all night will get you through, is almost as good. Now nothing stronger for me than Tylenol PM. I’m not sure I totally remember what really deep sleep is.

I need to change the colors of things now, so another expense is new paint, a kind of Versailles pink for the bathroom, a soft wheat for the kitchen, there goes $100. That’s only the beginning, as colors of other things will need to change, too.

I need to buy a new bed. The week before we broke up I was emailing him links to beds. “Which ones do you like?” I wrote to him. “I don’t know, nothing too over-the-top,” he responded. Well. Now my bed can be as over-the-top as I please. I am a few years away from fifty and I have never had a beautiful bed. Now I will have a beautiful bed. Years ago, in another crisis, he had promised to buy me a new bed, but he never did.

And there will need to be new sheets, and new pillowcases, and pillows, because the molecules of our coupledom are all up in the old bedding. That doesn’t come out with laundry detergent.

Some things are cheaper, like food, because you don’t really have to buy as much. But now I am the only one buying food for the cats, and paying the maintenance here myself. That’s a fairly large expense, but that’s OK, because it helps to make clear that this is my sweet sanctuary, this place. That someone might have overturned the flat world for a minute, but hey, I have superglue on the bottoms of my feet and I’m hanging on.

Other kinds of expenses that one realizes in a breakup are not necessarily financial. I mean, I have really been charging up my friend credit. One friend stayed here with me for two nights. Another talked to me for two hours, from one to three in the morning, when I was about to call 911. Another came over with soup and rescue remedy and sage advice. Another let me stay for a night so I could have a break from the apartment and all its memories. Another walked me around the neighborhood and let me sob while G. was in the apartment getting some of his stuff. I know that friendship doesn’t work on the same economy as money. It’s a better sort of system, really. The investments grow in beautiful and surprising ways, like the ad hoc topiary of morning glories.

Of course, the greatest expenses are emotional. I’m not really ready to tally up those expenses yet. Well. If I’m ululating now, it’s with very great sorrow.

I’ve had many little mantras getting me through these two weeks. One was a trick my mother taught me of asking myself questions: “Why am I doing so well?” “Why am I coping so beautifully?” “Why am I so relaxed?” and so on. This worked for a little while but started to feel a little OCD. (i.e. “Why am I doing so well” : a dactyl followed by a third epitrite, so I had to stop that.) At the moment I am singing to myself a song that got into my head when Marianne and Jim came over so kindly to watch Singing in the Rain with me at my request: “Would You,” that most beautiful love song. I printed out the lyrics and keep singing it as a way of making the emotions move up the column of my body instead of staying there as boxed and searing fire. I am thinking I should record it and use it as the soundtrack for something. “I just wanted to see what it was like to be with someone who wasn’t an artist,” he said. Well, huh. Why?

Another mantra that has been very useful has been this one:

We met.
We changed poetry.
We changed each other.
Now, time for another adventure.


When I get past the rawness, I’m sure things will be better. Already I notice a sense of relief when I come home and I notice there is no one here to resent or ignore me. I mean to stay positive even in the throes of this despair. I loved Gary, I really really did, even though it was at times a very troubled partnership. I thought we were going to be able to hang on and get old together; I thought he would be really great to get old with, because he always made me laugh. But OK, well, now I see I need a new scenario. Wish me luck, my friends, and infinite resourcefulness.