maybe the good goes everywhere.

radical love letter #76 | on the aftermath of love

A note, especially to new folks: Hi. <3 I’m a day late with the essay this week, I usually try to offer free letters on (most) Mondays, and paid subscriber content on Fridays. Apologies for the delay! Also, I know there are some new faces here from the Margaret Killjoy interview. Just a heads up: I am an anarchist, but don’t write exclusively about anarchy. For example, today’s essay is about love, which has everything to do with anarchism, really, but I don’t say so explicitly. Anyway, thanks for being here, I hope you’ll stick around. <3

Dear ones, 

There’s a joke that queer people constantly go to the “Personal Life” section of Wikipedia pages – whether reading up on a dead theorist or a current pop star, the memes suggest that we are most interested in dating history, in hopes we get a clue they may not be entirely heterosexual. I have a secret twist on this, which is that while I’m snooping the Personal Life section, I am especially keen to find out if they’ve been divorced or separated from a long love. I feel near desperate to know: have they survived heartbreak? Is there proof—if I may so boldly, in the words of Cher—that there is life after love? 

I have been fascinated with the aftermath of romance since my first breakup. Before, actually—as I admit in my book, I was grateful after getting dumped for the first time that I could better relate to Fiona Apple lyrics. It’s a curiosity that has nothing to do with schadenfreude. I’m not happy to know that people have experienced what I believe is one of the most excruciatingly painful iterations of grief, but I am desperate to see evidence that people emerge in one piece from it. I’m still unsure how I managed, during my last breakup, to do the tasks of staying alive, let alone anything beyond survival. “It’s a miracle we’re here at all,” Helena Fitzgerald subtitled her recent, beautiful essay on Old Loves. This is how it feels to know we’re all walking around like this, some of us with secret shattered organs inside our bony chest cavities. 

It’s a near compulsion I have, finding out if people have experienced the fallout of a long relationship. Last week I received a newsletter from Krista Tippett, the lovely and enlightened host of On Being. Tippett gets personal on the podcast sometimes, but not in a particularly detailed way. She’s a skilled interviewer – she connects when it’s relevant, but turns the focus on her guests. So when, in this email, she referenced being in Berlin in her twenties (she is now in her sixties), I immediately wanted to know if that would have been with a husband, and if so, is he still in the picture? I admire Tippett, I like that she cares about nature and spirituality and creating change in soft ways; is there a chance that heartbreak drove her toward that? (Wikipedia confirmed – she is divorced, never remarried, though possibly partnered without the internet knowing.) 

In New York this past weekend, I spent time with a close friend who is going through what she describes as “a second divorce from the same person.” It’s not that she married the person again, but rather that, eight years after their initial separation, there is an impending move and a kid and a whole second era of negotiations and decision-making. Parents who are old loves never get a chance at actual disappearance from one another's lives. I don’t mean to downplay how brutal that could be, but the truth is– sometimes I’m jealous of that requisite tether. I have an ex who has custody of the cat we shared, but after he started dating the woman he’d eventually marry, there was no space for me in his orbit anymore. It would be painful to navigate being in touch, but it would also mean he’d be more than ephemera.

“Where does the good go?” Tegan and Sara ask in a song I played on repeat after a breakup in my early 20s. It’s a lesbian pop music question that I keep asking myself. 

My most recent ex is more than a memory, he’s a person I continue to love and want to keep in my life forever. But we haven’t quite figured out the how yet. I don’t want to write more about that now, because it’s still in progress. But I do know that our good is still here, in the ether, floating around between each other and maybe elsewhere too. I remember reading something about how moments when we feel especially warm or awe-struck are aided by the lingering atoms of love energy. The sunset is beautiful on its own, but that visceral hit in your chest just might be the settling of someone else’s romance. Maybe the good goes everywhere. 

As I get older, my friends get older too. I have friends in their 30s, 40s, and 50s which means we are all full of decades now of love and the loss of it. We carry our past relationships like a DNA helix of typewriter font, little novellas composing the stuff of our cells. Our beginning sentence and our ending one swirling about and undoubtedly shaping us more than any predetermined genes. “We fell in love,” one might begin. “We never stopped, but we had to leave anyway,” most of mine would conclude. 

“What does it mean to love somebody?” Gilles Deleuze wonders. “Every love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to be formed….We each go through so many bodies in each other.”

I cry at weddings a lot, but I never cried more than at a wedding where I had known the groom most when he was with a previous partner. We were briefly in the same city when he and his longterm ex were together, then we were in different cities when the split happened and the subsequent new relationship formed. The breakup was mostly amicable and his new partner was absolutely lovely, a wonderful fit. My unbridled weeping watching him up at the altar wasn’t because anything bad was happening but because I knew there had been a whole different story in his bones, and here he was anyway. His ex was happily partnered with someone new and he was happily marrying someone new, and yet and yet….They were happy once too. What a thing to hold! 

I think I’m writing about this now because it’s autumn, the season for remembering. It’s the season I play Left and Leaving most, the Weakerthans album that says this is what happens in the after: “Memory will rust and erode into lists/Of all that you gave me/A blanket, some matches, this pain in my chest/The best parts of lonely.”

I’m obsessed with the stories of other people’s survival of loss partly because, like this, it’s beautiful. The best, the absolute best part of lonely is that there was something to be lonely from. The blanket, the matches, the pain. The songs, the fact that your friends bore witness to it, the fact that it was real enough that your friends might remember it at your wedding to someone else. Ephemera turned solid as a lump in a throat. What an absolute miracle. 

Right before one of my favorite Wikipedia deep dive moments I was doing yoga to the (at the time) new adrianne lenker album. One of the lyrics gutted me and I needed to know more about whom she may have been singing. On my yoga mat, I discovered that lenker is not only queer, but is also “deep friends” with her ex-husband/current bandmate. Deep friends! “Deep friends” gutted me too. From my tech-interrupted savasana, I cried on the mat. The song I listened to wasn’t for her ex-husband, it was for her now-ex girlfriend, but every love song I’ve ever heard from lenker/Big Thief has been beautiful. 

I think that’s why songs and the Personal Life archive hold so much meaning. It reminds us: every love story has been, at some point in time, beautiful. It reminds us, it wasn’t just a figment of our imagination: every love story has been true.

love & solidarity,

raechel