breakup
She refused to sleep in the same bed with a dead love, the skeleton of a passion.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol 7, 1966–1974) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 82.
Your old lovers get to be your really old lovers, and you can’t remember who broke up with who, or who got mad at who—just that the two of you remember things that no one else in the world does.
“This Is What 80 Looks Like,” by Gail Collins, New York Times, March 22, 2014.
Sometimes it is good fortune to be abandoned. While we are looking after our losses, our selves may slip back inside.
“An Average Sadness,” in I Thought My Father Was God (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 379.
For a long time I have felt the tug of my soul toward you as though you must be ill or in trouble, and it has taken a great control for me not to attempt to find you. I never hear of you, and I don’t know where you are, for all I know you may be wandering in Europe again. I am not hysterical, nor suffering from any illness, I know only that I love you with undying and undefeated love. I am waiting to see your work, how much you have gained by your freedom from our separation.
Letter to Thomas Wolfe, November 16, 1932, in My Other Loneliness: Letters of Thomas Wolfe and Aline Bernstein, ed. by Suzanne Stutman (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 349.
I believe I learned with her to love a woman, and I can’t see where or how my heartsickness will end.
Letter to Keith Botsford, dated November 5, 1959, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 183.
I turned sixty-nine on June 10th, ’84. On that day Alexandra said she was divorcing me. She moved out of the apartment then and there. Not before she had applied circular stickers, big ones, green and white, to her possessions and mine. Even bathrobes and carpet slippers carried these gummed labels, a weird snowfall of large round green and white flakes.
Letter to Hymen Slate, dated July 25, 1996, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 521–22.
The fluttering in the stomach goes away and the dull waking pain. Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone had said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shaft of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it.
Written on the Body (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 156.
Yes, I will go. I would rather grieve over your absence than over you.
Voices: Aphorisms, selected and translated by W. S. Merwin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 22.
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
The Journal 1837–1861 (New York: New York Review of Books, 2009), 7.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread, the thing her father said that hurt her, what she dreamed.
“Meditation at Lagunitas,” in The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 715.