Thanks For The Heartbreak, Facebook
I wake up, I turn on my laptop and log into Facebook with my coffee on my left side and my cell phone on my right, like it’s part of a morning ritual. Scrolling through the pages, I don’t notice anything wrong until I spot, 20 minutes into my scan, that a relationship status has changed. One word comes to my mind: soul-crushed-all-over-again-with-stomach-curling-and-heart-pounding-and-face-burning-all-while-I-try-to-keep-my-composure-and-not-break-down.
All at once, everything just becomes so much more concrete in my head, which, in reality, is stupid. It had been concrete a month back. It was over for a full month now. Yet, when I see the change, it’s like I’m being torn in two again, with that conversation playing in full blast in the background. How many more buckets of tears do I need to go through? How many more times do I need to see or hear my heart shatter into a million pieces? How many more times do I then need to pick them up off the ground and glue the bits back together again? Where is the damn super-glue? WHERE IS THE DAMN SUPER-GLUE?
Off the top of my head, I can count at least three more moments where I’ll need to endure this: when he changes his profile picture to him alone, when he changes his relationship status again but it’s with someone else, when he changes his profile picture to him being happy with someone else…
It’s sucky and that’s an understatement. It’s the same blow to my guts, but surprisingly, the pain gets a little softer every time and I’m less winded. Maybe it’s because I was expecting it, that I knew and understood whole-heartedly that he would have to eventually change everything one day and place me in his memories, as a part of his past. On the one hand, I just want to have the entire band-aid torn off, to have my wounds opened and revealed all at once so that I can tend to them and suture them up for good. On the other though, I actually want the slow and less emotionally-bearable conversion, the time to understand my feelings and process every single tiny emotion that I’m going though, just to know that at the end of the day I’m alive and breathing and well. Yes, despite all the inner turmoil and hurt, to know that I am well.
It’s funny how technology can skew the perception of “real” and “fake”. If there was no such thing as relationship status, I probably wouldn’t feel like how I do now. Painfully, but fortunately, it puts my thoughts into perspective. There is no such thing as “concrete” or “abstract” break-ups. When the feelings have been exhausted and the relationship has run its course, the only thing that’s left to do is to say goodbye. Status updates don’t validate anything more or less than what has happened. They don’t reflect a more affirmative concept of reality. They are merely notes passed along in class between students after the outbreak of a piece of news. Nothing more, nothing less. Sadly, sometimes, and actually in most cases with social media sites, it just so happens that the person who starts passing those notes is him.