"Breakups are difficult for writers because we didn’t just love you, we love the story that we wrote you into. We loved the way you kissed us for the first time – with a crestfallen expression that overtook your face as we backed away slowly, wanting nothing more than to evade the possibility of losing you to love gone sour, hands grasped tightly and breaths rising slowly together as your lips broke down all our defenses and drew themselves impossibly close. The way we captured that instant forever in our Kodak-moment minds, plunging into a dark-room where futures entwine and develop beneath the overly-exposure of hope. We know on some level that you made out with us outside a bar on the West side of town because both of us were wasted and didn’t want to go home alone. But writers dispose of that part of their mind; the part that rationalizes and examines what has happened. Writers don’t remember the taste of stale beer and meat pizza on your lips as they kissed them. Writers re-invent their own histories.
Breakups are difficult for writers because your life is a story rife for telling. We lie awake tortured by the plot lines we summon you into – each romance a whirlwind, each lover a saint. You will exist in the mind of a writer long after your life has dissolved into a pattern Tivo and Chinese take-out – you will be woven into chronicles and fantasies that you’ll never live. The shoes we gave you last Christmas are not shoes – they are the soles that carry you over new lands, past the Warfield that once was our love, on to a sea of chance and change. The smile you gave us at the grocery store last Thursday was not awkward and somewhat forced, it was the struggle of a deeply repressed passion that tears you into pieces with every haggard breath you take. Writers will not take your life for the sometimes-good-and-sometimes-bad mediocrity that it is once you leave