Hello friends and lovers,
Heartbreak makes people do wild things: cut bangs, buy crystals, text their ex at 2 a.m. in the tone of a Shakespearean ghost. But what if instead of spiraling, you opened…a Google Doc? This essay by Molly Gott is about one strangely simple, surprisingly effective digital salve: a shared doc full of wisdom and reminders that you’re not the first person to ugly-cry on public transit. Happy clicking!
We get by with a little help from our friends,
The Prism Team
Molly Gott is a writer living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading.
One thing that makes Molly feel well: “Staring into my dog’s eyes.”
I thought I was alone in my heartache. Then I started reading.
This morning I received a text with a link to a poem called “Divorce.” “Is this already in the doc?” my friend Emma wanted to know. I turned on my computer, navigated to Google Drive, and opened the file called “molly breakup doc.” “Yep,” I texted back. “Is everything okay?”
My girlfriend of nine years left me in the fall of 2020. By the spring of 2022, I was still asking my therapist what was normal. I know there is no normal, per se, but sometimes you have to ask anyway. Was it normal, for example, that I was still dreaming of her, standing in a warehouse bathroom or floating in a big green pool? Was it normal that, when I hit a snag while combing my hair, I started crying, because she’d always brushed out the knots for me? And, in retrospect, was that normal — that she’d been brushing my hair in the first place?
My therapist said, “I think, when someone has experienced a very significant loss — ”
“Loss!” I interrupted. “That’s what’s happening. I have experienced a very significant loss.” I was shocked. I couldn’t believe it. My abnormality had a name. It was a very common word.
My friend Shona said when her ex left her, she burst into tears in front of a grocery clerk who’d asked how her day was going. She cried so hard that the man offered her a chair. In a parking lot, a year later, another friend, Eva, said, “After my divorce, I felt like I had a PhD in my husband and nothing to use it for.” Over tea in her kitchen, Dasha told me how once, after a really bad one, she lived for two long years without touching anyone, except for little brushes on the subway. On a winter afternoon at the dog run, Munira turned from the big gray sky and declared: “The queer divorcée is the most interesting person in any room.” But I didn’t want to be interesting, I wanted to go back in time.
My friends helped, of course they did, but my friends were not enough. I needed strangers, the private fears and ugly thoughts of people who did not know or love me. Luckily, I was a black hole now. I exerted a gravitational pull. My magnetism attracted breakup stories. Poems, songs, and novels all came to me, of their own accord. They gathered at my center (this is called accretion) until, one night in December, lying in bed, I decided to collate them. I created a Google Doc, titled it “molly breakup doc,” then copied and pasted a few links to poems.
All winter and all spring, I added to the document, squirling away links with ferocity. I was particularly attracted to anything made by now-older people who, whether they said it directly or not, had clearly thought they were going to die...and then did not die.
The other thing I wanted, despite knowing it was impossible, was a timeline. I filled the document with temporal guideposts — poems, songs, and stories that mentioned specific amounts of time elapsing. One of the Indigo Girls had still been asking when her ex was gonna come home two years after their separation. Kaia Wilson was still sleeping in her ex’s t-shirt four years later. It took Maggie Nelson three years to no longer be counting the days.
Then, someone broke up with my friend Nicole. In a fit of solidarity, I sent the document to her. Now, it had an audience. More people broke up. Friends of friends, former coworkers, neighbors. Having a document ready to send is a wonderful experiment if you want to investigate how frequently people are breaking up. Because the answer is constantly. There is an epidemic of separation in this world. I can say now that this is not a bad thing. I wanted my document to comfort other people, but I also wanted other people to tell me what my document said. Not the individual stories, poems, or songs, but the document as a whole, taken as composite. What was happening to me? I added another link, moved a different one around — did that change anything?