Isn’t begging just an unabashed form of static states like dreaming, yearning, hoping?

Embarrassment, breakups, Sabrina Carpenter, alternate universes

Dear One,

I haven’t written you in half a year. It’s because these days I am busy feeling embarrassed. It’s because of my breakup.

In my mind, I had committed what was among the greatest sins in my household: I was a fool. I had loved deeply, and I had been left.

But this isn’t a useful narrative.

Sabrina Carpenter gets it. I think about her song “Please Please Please” a lot, and not just because Halle Bailey sang a sweet cover of it.

It’s the lyrics, it’s the sound. “Please” began my prayers growing up, and now it’s a word that accompanies some sleepless nights.

I don’t normally think of myself as someone who begs, but isn’t begging just an unabashed form of action, of static states like dreaming, yearning, hoping? I do these things a lot. I survived many things by mastering the art of functional static states.

Sabrina’s song isn’t exactly static, it’s not really begging, though most of the song reads that way:

Please, please, please
Don't prove I'm right
And please, pleasе, please
Don't bring me to tеars when I just did my makeup so nice

Most people would ask their lover to prove them wrong, but she knows. She’s in denial. Her counterintuitive plea turns into:

Heartbreak is one thing, my ego's another
I beg you, don't embarrass me, motherfucker, oh
Please, please, please

And I just think that’s so marvelous. How smoothly her pleading turns into a threat, masqueraded by the ask, the politeness. If she was really begging would she include “motherfucker”? It’s brat energy subsumed by demureness. Please forgive me for that line, I work in influencer marketing…motherfucker.

A friend, who also left her city after a breakup, shared with me that for a year she told herself that she had been forced to leave. This is how I thought of my situation as well. She saw her ex everywhere. That’s where we, those are the couches where, the friends who, the store where, remember that time when. Everywhere. Only recently did she remember that she had chosen to leave. To build a new narrative, to forge a new self.

Even before my breakup was complete I knew I could not stay. When you date someone for a while, they become a part of you. Loving someone long enough changes your constitution, your literal cells, don’t cite me. And afterward, you have to figure out how to extract yourself without destroying yourself irretrievably.

I did my best while living in LA. Now, I cry every time I have to return. A piece of me breaks off and is lost to me forever. Because it is the place where I tried so hard to be happy, to be accepted, to get around, to keep my art alive, only to be rejected and only after I was not the same.

My sense of loss gets deeper and more painful as time goes on. It’s inversely related it turns out: the happier I am, the deeper my relationships get in Philly, the more I feel the impact of the life I lost. It’s in the contrast. A breakup is not just the end of a relationship, it is also the loss of friends, family, home, your identity, your rhythms, your jokes. A language with two speakers goes extinct.

I know it has been a year now. It is time to stop feeling sorry for myself. It is time to deal with reality. Isn’t it beautiful to have loved and been loved at all? But I remember all those dreams. I was so young. I am still so young, they tell me. I remember love and I remember leaving LA with nothing but my books and two suitcases. All that time spent yet nothing to show for it. This, too, isn’t useful thinking.

Philly was where I would have gone had I not gone to LA. In one way, it’s the true timeline, the one where I chose myself. I spent nearly a year afraid to sink into my new environment too deeply. It was too good to be true. It too would crumble. I yearned for LA, which felt like the real universe, even though it was undoubtedly worse.

In Philly, I felt more nourished by friends, my daily step count doubled, my relationship to my job improved. But in my head, I never left. I was still spending $50 to get somewhere and back and another $50 on a meal. I was still attending readings, lounging at parks, wishing the 60 degree weather would blossom into a shining 70 degrees. For a while, I waited for a ripple in the universe, the one that would yank me back. But it never came. I didn’t want it to either.

I’m attracted to Sabrina’s triple please because it strikes me as unadulterated. It feels so honest. It is Dolly Parton and it is Beyoncé. The please please please makes you believe something is on the other side, that someone might grant you this wish, relief, they might act right in the first place, they might love you, they might stay. It’s desperate. It’s also ferocious.

I think also of Beyoncé’s “Hold Up.” After being subsumed by water she dons a yellow dress and prances through the street with a bat. She smashes a car window or four, a hydrant, all while smiling. And that seems right too.

My point is that I haven’t given myself space to express my full range. It’s partially out of respect. I have a hard time reconciling feeling the full extent of my emotions with my desire to be as kind but as true as I can. They feel the same to me, the begging and the breaking. Only, the breaking makes you feel better and the begging makes you feel pathetic.

Still, both are a reaction, a sign that I’m still working on inhabiting my new universe (and never fear, I recently started work with an amazing therapist).

But then the internet says, of course your life would fall apart to clear space. “Your new life will cost you your old one.”

sonyased5

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I am humbled to feel on the verge of the best version of myself and my life. Isn’t it true that destruction is where we are forged anew?