How to fall out of love: A beginner's guide

How to fall out of love: A beginner’s guide

Step 1: Cry

Step 2: Cry even more

Step 3-4: Allow the tears to escape your ducts like birds migrating for the winter, finding someplace warm, desperately leaving the cold behind.

Step 5: Immediately reactivate your tinder profile. It’s rebound time. Now realize that it’s shit, and that the lesbians are all weird and the straight guy's are all looking to fuck. Delete your tinder profile.

Step 6: Throw out all of his stuff. Burn it, put it in a bag and toss it in the river. Forget about that red v neck he lent to you, saying you looked cuter in it. Forget about the shitty art he told you he’d been working on for years; it was shit. Tear up that stupid fucking valentine’s day card he gave to you, quickly writing in it while you were downstairs, obviously forgetting to actually get you anything. Just forget about it, you don’t need remnants of him scattered all around you, use his toothbrush to clean your toilet.

Step 7: Don’t isolate yourself. Allow yourself to feel everything that you need to feel, but don’t dwell on it. Don’t allow it to consume you, to drown you. This is when you need to call your best friend. This is when you need to laugh about how stupid you were, about how glad you are to be free, even if you’re not completely honest about it, you need to tell yourself that you’re okay. You need to distract yourself a bit.

Step 8: Find comfort in the fact that he wrote a depressing post about you on tumblr, let it soak it. He’s miserable, good. He deserves it.

Step 9: What the fuck are you doing stalking his social media? Block his number, delete instagram and facebook off your phone. Read a good book, emerge yourself in beautiful words and candy-like literature. Eat that shit up.

Step 10: Find out that he’s seeing someone else, even just casually, and cry more, but don’t cry as much as you used to.

Step 11: Tell him you need to see him, you want your stuff back, and of course you kept all of his, so you want to give it back.

Step 12: See him, see the way he looks at you, and panic a little.

Step 13: End up being, “casual” with him. Tell yourself you know what you’re doing. Tell yourself it’s kind of fun, sneaking around, being physical again.

Step 14: Face the reality that you’re just lonely. Face the reality that he’s really annoying, that he only cares about himself, that the way he looks at you is no longer with love and admiration, it is now longing, lust, and objectifying. He’s looking at you, but he’s not really looking at you.

Step 15: Have a sudden realization; you’re not angry about his past unfaithfulness, you’re not even sad. You feel nothing about the fact that he cheated, for once in your life, you feel empty about him.

Step 16: Sit on your porch with him, after three nights of seeing him, and find that you have no fucking idea what he’s talking about, the words of a depressed life and pity seeking personality are escaping him, but you can’t hear him. All you can hear is the plane, as you look up into the grey sky, and you think to yourself, maybe he’s just the clouds; this thick fog of water and air, and maybe you just need to get through it, maybe you’re the plane, maybe you can fly.