Since I broke up with my ex, quite a lot of people have sought to reassure me that “you’ll find someone else.” It’s incredibly kind and well-meaning, and tempting as all hell to lean in to the idea. Go shopping for men, you say? Sounds fun! Pick one who’s better? Sweet! Hey presto – happiness awaits! I get why people offer this advice, and I don’t want to bat it away with a sarky response because it comes from a place of kindness. It’s understandable and admirable to try to comfort someone who’s hurting. But I don’t really like “you’ll find someone else”, and I thought I’d have a crack at explaining why.

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I’m not very chatty on Twitter any more, and it wasn’t until last night when I spoke to a friend on the phone that I realised… I don’t even call my friends that much these days. The last few weeks have been weird and frightening, and they’re only going to get weirder and more frightening until sometime in June when the fear will come to a head and I’ll either sink, swim, or cling desperately to any of the friends I haven’t so far pissed off by ignoring. This is how it works, when my mental health is bad: I hide.

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Note: I wrote this one quite a while ago, and it happened even longer ago. 

His flat is filled with mirrors, which is helpful for two people who really love watching ourselves fuck. He plays Massive Attack at just the right volume, which is great for two people who really like fucking to Massive Attack. And as I hold myself up on the corner of the kitchen counter, one foot planted on the surface and another on the shelf nearby, holding my cunt at the perfect height for him to slam his cock home, he growls: “What do you say?” And I tell him, breathlessly, “thank you.”

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It wasn’t that my body was wrong, for a start. Over the course of our relationship I changed a lot – sometimes I looked fucking spectacular and other times I looked crap. Same with him. I fancied the fuck out of him, always, regardless of what shape or size his body was or how he’d chosen to dress it today. We lived, we grew, we changed: our bodies could never have been the reason why we broke up.

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I don’t sleep in our bedroom any more, I decamped to the spare room months ago. There are too many ghosts in our bedroom now, I do not like being in it. The room in which my ex-boyfriend used to work (and play, and sleep, and live) has long since been closed off: I use the space for drying laundry, but the door to it is firmly shut unless I’m hanging socks. This house is riddled with shadow-versions of him, and most of them congregate in there.

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