After a Heartbreak, the Haunting

For the first time in nine years, I'm learning to fight my demons on my own.

When I woke up, I had no idea where I was. The pillowcase was covered in tears, and when I rubbed my eyes, they were still wet. I finally moved my gaze from the ceiling to the window, and the big blue sky reminded me that I was on a ranch in Texas, on a spur-of-the-moment date with an artist that had stretched on for one-too-many days. 

Luckily, the man I’d been spending my nights with had already risen. When I finally got to my feet and into the kitchen, he was sitting in the middle of the room, his eyes wide, his hair standing on end.

“Do you remember what happened last night?” he whispered.

“No,” I said, worried.

And so he told me the story of the ghost who visited us in the night—an older woman with long, blonde hair who floated in circles around the room, disturbing the mirrors and the light fixtures. She came to sit by my side, he said, and wouldn’t leave me even after he told her to go. Terrified and with this voice trembling, he walked into the main hallway of our little cabin, opened the front door, and screamed that she was no longer welcome here. He blinked, and she was gone.

He wasn’t sure, he said, if she was there to help or haunt me, so out of caution, he coaxed me out of bed and brought me into the guest room where I slept for the rest of the night. He stayed on watch in the living room, unable to sleep. And here he was, hours later, still terrified.

I was relieved when he finished. It was true that I didn’t remember anything from his insane story—not even the part where he moved me to another bedroom. But I did remember being visited by a ghost of my own. 

In my ghost story, I was on the beach that my lover and I once called home. I crossed the Strand, which was eerily empty, and walked up the green hills that we used to admire from our living room window. Finally, I turned left on Crest Drive as I’d done countless times before. There were no sounds, no cars, no people around. I turned the lock of the old door, and carefully opened it to mind our wandering cats. 

And there he was—perched on the stairway, tying the laces of his Nike sneakers. He was in his navy scrubs and the scrub cap that always seemed (to me, at least) worryingly tight on his head. Juniper, our ginger cat, was dancing around him, headbutting his knees and flicking her tail in between his legs. They both looked up at me in unison. 

“Hi babe,” he said, as though nothing had changed between the two of us. “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for you.”

Before I could answer, I was awake. 

I left Texas later that day, after an uncomfortable goodbye with the man who tried fighting my ghosts. But by the time I got on the plane, I at least had clarity: For the first time in nine years, I was going to have to fight a battle on my own. 

It’s been almost a year since I physically separated from my ex-partner, and about half that since we finally had the bravery to sit down next to each other, cry together, and officially call it quits. We’ve made no grand gestures or, God forbid, any Notes App declarations that we are no longer together. Instead, we made the difficult phone calls to our close friends and family and mostly sat passively and watched as the threads we’d carefully woven to be together unraveled. 

Absent a grand gesture (we never married, so there was no divorce), some of the more uncomfortable parts of our aftermath happened when we had to break the news to well-meaning people who were rooting for us. A fabulous gay man recently waved at me from across a bar and parted seas of men, just to plead with me to send his love to my “excellent doctor husband on Good Morning America.” There was so much tenderness in his eyes that I didn’t have the heart to break the news to him. Instead, I assured him I’d pass along the message.

In other interactions like these, I’ve learned to smile and say that, while the relationship is no more, there will always be love. I’ve said this even when I wasn’t sure it was true—kind of like a prayer, perhaps with the hope of one day making it so. 

I expected that, in these months after our ending, I would lean more on rage to comfort me. I am, after all, a product of my Italian-American upbringing. Anger is always where I’ve felt safe; it’s been a defense that has fueled me through some of the darker chapters of my life. But by the time my love actually walked out the door, his suitcase trailing behind him, I was shocked to find that there really wasn’t any anger left. (Believe me, it’s flared up in moments—but even those have been few and far between.) 

Instead, there was only a sadness that I’ve never quite felt until now. Some people have called it grief, and I guess that’s true to an extent—but there should be a different word to describe what it feels like when you’re grieving the living. When things get so tender out of nowhere that you have to pull your car over in the middle of rush hour just so you can cry. Or when your iPhone prompts you, in the middle of a perfectly routine work meeting, with a “Memory” of you and your ex on vacation. Or when you’re finally falling asleep in the early promise of another’s embrace, only to close your eyes and see nothing but the face of the man you slept next to for nine years of your life. 

I don’t mean to make it all sound sad, because truly, it’s not. When I waded through the murkiness of the sorrow, my feet started to finally flutter through clearer waters. I have tasted freedom, and it is divine. For the first time since I was in college, I went out with friends until the sun started to rise. I’ve gone on perfectly lovely dates with impressive, wonderful gentlemen. I decorated a brand-new apartment without having to consult anyone but me, myself, and I. And I’ve found both pleasure and intimacy with friends and perfect strangers, each of whom were like lightposts on a path that have brought me back to the beauty and freedom of my body. 

It’s within these moments of intimacy that I feel something that resembles sadness. And I think that’s because these moments of tenderness awaken a pleasure I didn’t know was lying dormant. How long had it been since I’d felt adored? Or cared for? Or safe? While conventional wisdom taught me that no-strings attachments would be the surest way to conquer a breakup, it’s actually the strings I’ve held onto until they brought me to the shore. 

I’ve now wondered if I was sleepwalking through the last few years of my relationship, lost somewhere in someone else’s dreams or expectations of me. But it’s futile, I think, to revisit the decisions made in the throes of what can only be described as a relationship on life support—when our love calcified into something else, a fossil chained to time and obligation. In those final years, we constantly chose ourselves—not to spite the other, but to do something worse: to chip away, slowly, at the bond we’d built together. 

If this breakup has lessons, they are lying within the joy I’ve felt. Ironically, leaning into the joy is the only way I’ve been able to understand the depths of my sorrow. What I was mourning was not the loss of someone else, but instead, it was coming to grips with just how much I’d lost myself. If anything, the ghost that’s haunted me is the version of me who stayed too long, hanging onto a love that would never be the same, compromising and contorting myself until I’d fit back inside the containers that once felt big enough to hold us. 

Some days, I yearned for the time back. I replayed old decisions and old arguments, and especially the move to Los Angeles, and felt a familiar resentment come creeping back into my heart. But somehow, against all my prayers, protests, and wishes, this city won me over. It’s where a safety net of friends slowly became family, and a job working for a community center became a lifeline, coaxing me out of depression and into the arms of people who, by the grace of God, reminded me that I had purpose. 

My life in LA is often comically different from the one I led in New York City. I traded my fashion credentials for a nonprofit, swapped the subway for a white Jeep Wrangler (so I could be just like Cher in Clueless, obviously), and I spend most nights going to bed at a decent hour. I even joined a church—a gay one, of course—and gave a guest sermon there in May. 

It’s one thing to do work for the community, which I think I could argue I did through some of my journalism jobs in New York. But it’s another thing to work for the community, which I do in Los Angeles. There are people who are counting on us to do a good job, and to do right by the people who need our care the most. They are living as residents on our campus, eating food from our kitchen, getting care from our health center, and gathering together at our events.

It’s hard to feel sorry for oneself when you’re surrounded by work like this. And luckily, it’s been near impossible to stay home when you know there’s a community who’s expecting you to show up and be present, and work your magic. So much of the work that I’ve led lately has been about our messaging to the world: How do we remind people to love and support us in the face of a movement that’s built upon hate? 

At the bedrock of this work is an undying, fearless optimism. You simply need to believe in love. And what’s crazy is that, even at the very worst moments of this past year, I have never once stopped believing. I have never once doubted that love would be out there, once again, for the both of us. That’s how I know that not a second of our nine years together was wasted: I believe in love because I experienced it. And now, because of this work,  I know firsthand what a profound and utterly precious gift that is.

Last month, I found myself leading our organization’s double-decker bus and 200-person strong marching contingent at Los Angeles Pride. I’d become the de facto ring leader, giving directions to the marchers and bus driver so we didn’t collide with the dancing troupe in front of us. I was jumping and screaming and dancing and orchestrating photography and the press. I felt ridiculous and utterly proud, all at the same time. 

There was a group of LGBTQ+ seniors with us, including four gentlemen who accessed services and lived at our Center. I could tell that two of them were a couple, so I asked if they wouldn’t mind kissing each other for a photo. They did, and the entire crowd around them cheered, asking them to do it again. (They acquiesced.)

“We’ve been together since 1970,” one of them said to me in a whisper, presumably so as not to age himself. “Would you believe that? And now look at the world.” He turned around, waving at the supporters gathered in the streets, who were all clutching their rainbow flags. 

Then, just as though he was an angel, he asked: “Isn’t it amazing what love can do?”

You can donate to the life-saving work of the Los Angeles LGBT Center here.