Jessie Stephens - Heartsick: Three Stories about Love, Pain, and What Happens in Between

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To my twin sister, Clare. The love of my life.

Im in an airport bookshop.

A shop assistant asks if I need a hand with anything and I shake my head, knowing that if I speak my voice will crackand when the tears come they tend not to stop.

Im looking for a book Im fairly certain doesnt exist. I want something that will put into words how Im feeling right nowa sensation I have no vocabulary for.

You see, Im not meant to be in this bookshop alone, waiting for my sister and a friend to finish up at some jewelry shop next door. This isnt what this moment is supposed to look like. Im still attached to another set of moments, ones Id played out in my head until theyd become fact. Im being tortured by a parallel existence: one in which my boyfriend hasnt broken up with me and were on the trip we planned, taking turns sleeping on each others shoulder in our cramped economy seats.

I want a book that puts words around how Im feeling and doesnt try to make me feel something different. That provides no instructions. That reminds me that this experienceand the unholy blend of grief and self-loathing that accompanies itis as old as humans are. Some of the first stories humans ever told were about this feeling. So why am I, a twenty-first-century woman, eight days after being dumped on an otherwise unexceptional Tuesday, certain Im the only person ever to have felt like this?

I get on that planewithout a bookand experience a holiday devoid of color and taste. I look for his face in the lantern-filled markets of Hi An and in the crowded museums of Ho Chi Minh City. Im suffocating inside Sylvia Plaths bell jar, clamped shut over me no matter where I go. I know theres a vibrant new world on the other side of the glass, but Im unable to touch it. Im obsessed with my phone. I check and post and check again and beg it to ring and look to see if hes reacted to my photo. My life has become an empty performance for the one person who isnt watching.

For a while, I thought that was where the idea for this book began. But an idea doesnt arrive once. It haunts you, finding its way into your past and future, tapping you on the shoulder until you do something with it.

So this book probably started well before that.

IM INTERVIEWING A man for my masters thesis. Hes sixty-five, tall, has a hint of a Scottish accent, and has been married to the same woman for more than half his life. I ask him about his first relationship. He says he was fourteen. I see his eyes go glassy. He coughs. Tries to compose himself. But his eyes just get wetter and the tip of his nose turns pink.

He tells me her name was Patricia and she broke up with him suddenly, and that he then had to ride the bus with her every day for the rest of the year.

Now that I think about it, I was terribly heartbroken, he says, shocked by his proximity to his own pain from more than fifty years ago. The feeling is still right there, living in his chest. Its not because he doesnt love the woman he married. He says, Shes been the most wonderful thing for me. Everything I hoped for. Shes smart, shes loving, shes just a wonderful companion for me. And its just been its been one of the real treasures of my life.

But inside him, there is space for both. Love for the woman he married and sorrow for the girl who left him.

There are three things I learn from that man, tall and broad, wearing a well-fitted tan coat.

The first is that heartbreak doesnt belong to women.

The second is that heartbreak doesnt belong to the young.

And the third is that heartbreak might never really leave you. Even if you fall in love again. Even if the years wear on and you forget the color of their eyes or what you talked about. Even if it was never right and your life went in the direction it needed to. Even then, the part that was broken by someone else when you were fourteen never quite heals.

But then, this book probably started before that.

IM NINETEEN. THE hot water is turning cold as I am curled in the fetal position in the shower, unable to grasp how much this hurts. Ive been broken up with by a boyfriend I thought Id marry. Hes told me he doesnt love me anymore, and I think theres probably someone else. Ill later learn there is. I cant eat and I barely sleep, sure that this event has confirmed something I already know about myself: Im fundamentally unlovable. An empty sack of flesh, uninteresting and vacuous, playing the part of a girlfriend but never quite being enough. I feel embarrassed about what he knows about me. Ashamed. Stupid that I let someone get close enough to see all the ugly parts.

But then, this book probably started before that.

IM FIFTEEN. THE study is dark because the curtains are drawn and my friends and I are checking MSN Messenger. I have a boyfriend at the time. Ive noticed that people look at me differently when I tell them that. His name is Jordan and I like how he smells. I remember considering my face from every angle the first time we met, how it would look if he was sitting to my right or to my left, how my nose bulges at the end from straight on. Boys had called me ugly beforeboys who saw my pictures over MSN Messenger and whod then been horrified when Id shown up in real life. But Jordan was the first boy to tell me I was beautiful. And for a few months, I let myself believe him.

But on this Sunday afternoon in our dark study, I notice that Jordan has changed his name on MSN. It once had a love heart and my name following his. It still has the love heart. But now its followed by a different name. The name of a friend Id introduced him to the day before. I think I might be dreaming and that this is a nightmare Ill wake up from. It isnt.

But then, this book probably started before that.

IM SEVEN AND I know I like boys. I notice that theres a certain kind of girl they likeand that girl isnt me. Its a slow heartbreak, I suppose, watching the boy I think is funny and handsome watch someone else. At a Friday night disco, the boys line up to dance with the prettiest girl in the class. They do not line up to dance with me. One day, I give the boy I like a packet of chips from my lunch box and he pays me a fair bit of attention for the rest of the afternoon. But once Mum stops putting chips in my lunch box, the sandy-haired boy in my year loses interest in hanging out. It takes me a while, but eventually I figure he might have been using me for the chips.

THIS BOOK WAS born in the hours Ive waited for men to message me back and who never did. In the years full of almost-relationships, where I thought I cannot handle another rejection and then found myself turned down by someone I wasnt even sure I liked. This book was forged over hundreds of conversations with people who cried and yelled and laughed as they watched their lives be upended by a breakup.

They taught me that heartbreak has nothing to do with who you are. What you have or dont have, whether you could have or should have been better. Katy Perrys been dumped and serial killers serving life sentences have been known to have three girlfriends. Love doesnt make any sense. And having experienced romantic rejection doesnt say anything about the quality of a person. Relationships are not some test we fail or pass. They have a little to do with luck. A lot to do with timing. There are few things we control less than how someone else feels about us. And, just as loves magic can appear from nowhere and cast a spell on two unsuspecting people, so too can it disappear for no reason at all. So I wrote the book I wanted to find in that airport bookshop.