The Breakup
I know I promised to avoid idle words and politics in this blogthing, but this is more of a creative writing exercise: I broke up with Hillary. Well, I didn’t do it per se, but when I saw a website that asked me to write a break-up letter to the junior senator from New York, I wrote something. It’s written from the perspective of someone who might have actually dated her campaign in the first place, of course, and it’s a kind of a fantasy of the month after the breakup, after the dropout, a fictional reflection on how she left the race.
Writing this was fun. It was a chance to get in a different mindset. It was a chance to meditate on what it means to come to know and trust and love these people who run. But rereading it after I wrote it, it struck me how much the language mirrored something I wrote last year: a poem about the clumsy joy of first-time love and the slow tidal flow of the end. That strange simultaneous emotion, that juxtaposition of hope and regret, feels strong in one as in the other.
Don’t get me wrong: the genre of breakup literature shares ever so many clichés. But there’s something else here. How seldom in life do we allow another person to come in? How seldom do we allow ourselves to be swept away? In love we come to own the joys and the sadnesses of our other, we allow our feelings and our hopes — to say nothing of things like books and plates — to get jumbled up. We allow it, and we adore it.
A lot of people have lives that are jumbled up with politics right now. Acclaimed writer Nora Ephron is jumbled up with Hillary. So is Erin Vest. I’ve allowed myself to become jumbled up with Barack Obama; the number of mixed up plates is staggering, to say nothing of the hopes and the dreams.
I know it’s the wrong analogy for politics. But I think a lot of us are jumbled up right now. We’ve tied the righteousness of our values, values that we hold inside ourselves, to someone other than ourselves. It’s not just picking someone for the job anymore. It’s personal. And it makes me wonder: If there isn’t a President Obama — or worse, if there is and he fails — what’s that breakup letter going to look like?
Maybe we should start writing now, just in case.
-j
As submitted to nicetrygiveup.org:
Dear Hillary,
We started off rather well, I think. And it was going fine until this one night when you insulted a very good friend of ours — while he was sitting right there at the table! For a moment it looked like the whole evening was going to be a complete disaster, and I thought to myself, “this is why we can’t have nice friends.”
I don’t know. Some of your friends kept on telling you to be tough, to be punchy and aggressive. I don’t know why you listened to them, really. Sometimes I wonder if they were really looking out for you. What they didn’t tell you is that I liked you the way you were. All your real friends liked you for you, and you knew that. You didn’t have to pretend.
But you did. And, I dunno, when I saw you in those dark days, it felt as though I didn’t even know you anymore.
There were still some good times after that night, but let’s be frank. There were fights. There was yelling. We both knew where this relationship was headed, and neither of us could stop it. Then, on a crisp spring evening, we decided to part ways. You recognized the things that had come between us, and with a mutual sense of goodwill, we both let go.
Watching you walk away that night with such grace and eloquence, it all came back to me. I remembered that woman — no, that human being — that I’d fallen in love with, that I’d been in love with all along. And after watching you pretend for so long, I thought to myself: “She’s been in there the whole time.”
I wish it were not too late for us.
But it is.
