How to Heal By Vanessa Escobar

 

1. Drink lots of water. Pee constantly.
2. Listen to SZA and Travis Scott’s song “Love Galore.” Dance around your apartment while you sing along to the lyrics. Pretend you are rapping the song for maximum effect.
3. Avoid every bar you visited before and during knowing her. No good comes from the drink overtaking you, especially if she’s there too.
4. Go indoor rock climbing. Scale up a cliff that no one forced you to. You will feel weak, but you carried your entire body weight all the way to the top. Try to get back down slowly. Miss your footing, slip, and crash against the wall. As you tumble down, the instructor tries to shout out how to stop the free fall. The auto belay catches your descent and you throw your feet into the wall. You fall onto the mat and lay there, staring at the ceiling. A cute lesbian couple comes up to you to see if you are okay and if you’d like to grab a beer with them. You run away; fingers still white from the chalk.
5. Accept the orange tulips in the mason jar from your neighbors. They love you.
6. Allow fantasies of her to come and go. The more you resist, the harder the thoughts.
7. Pretend she’s by your side some nights: it’s the only way you can fall asleep.
8. Mute all of? her social media profiles and take a break away from the internet.
9. Cry on New Year’s Eve because you don’t want to go out, but your friends are waiting for you. Open the door to your balcony and yell out into the trees, “why did you dip out on me, babe?” Eat several bowls of pasta, wipe your tears, call an Uber, go to the bar and talk to a stranger about how much you love her. Leave after this public embarrassment.
10. Go on a walk at the bayou the next day and find a bridge full of love locks. Search for her name.
11. Put her picture in a box with things of former lovers. You can’t look at her anymore.
12. Make a salmon salad every night for two weeks. Only use honey mustard dressing.
13. Get a tarot card reading. Get angry when your love card is the seven of swords. Cry on the way home.
14. Go to an Indian buffet and fill up on two plates of food and dessert. Eat until you’re in pain. You’ve never been hungrier.
15. When the panic comes, jump into the shower and make sure the water is hot. Let it hit your face and then count the tiles on the wall.
16. Teach your friend’s 7-year-old how to dribble the soccer ball in their backyard.
17. Don’t attend brunch despite the many invites you receive. You need time alone. You need to breathe.
18. Start working out.
19. Do a five-mile social bike ride with people you don’t know. Go to the sports bar with them and order a turkey burger. When the server brings you a black bean burger, eat it anyway.
20. Give up on the idea of hating her. Hating someone only makes the attachment stronger, and you don’t hate her anyway. Could never be fully mad at her.
21. Under no circumstances, text her happy birthday, even though you know she thinks none of her friends will remember. She doesn’t want to hear from you.
22. Fill your weekends with low-key social hangs and hope no one brings her up. If they try to tell you what she’s been posting, shake your head and say you can’t know, maybe not ever.
23. Buy new button ups and dye your hair black.
24. Stand yourself up for your solo date. Say everyone else has stood you up and you just wanted a taste. Show up for the second chance you give yourself. Eat ramen and spill some on your shirt. Take yourself home anyways.
25. Tell yourself it’s okay to miss someone you love even if they are no longer in your life anymore.
26. Accept that some heartbreaks don’t allow room for friendship.
27. Know that there is no ointment you put on twice a day for heartbreak.
28. Seek out different pains, like a tattoo. The buzz of the tattoo gun is comforting. And it hurts in a good way but also in a way that’s not enough. Halfway through, when the needle hits the bone, you feel like screaming stop. It’s unbearable. But you paid for this. You have to lay there and cover your mouth and take it. Follow through. For five minutes you feel good. Realize it didn’t help at all.
29. Keep practicing soccer over and over. Throw yourself into it completely. Wear the socks she gave you for Christmas for good luck. They are rainbow-colored with pictures of your dog.
30. Pretend you are six months from now and she comes over and makes love to you.
31. Sleep on her side of the bed until it’s your side of the bed again.
32. Try to do a 48-hour fast to lose a few pounds. Give up at 1 pm the first day. You need food. You would never tell anyone not to eat for two days.
33. Write note after note on your iPhone. Every single thought. Release them from your head.
34. Go on walks outside.
35. Drink more water. Your pee is clear now.
36. Go to CrossFit with your friend. Die. Lay down on the mat like a beached whale.
37. Look at her social media.
38. Find out she’s been fucking someone else the whole time. And all your friends knew, but no one knew how to tell you because you are still so sad.
39. Take a few days.
43. Stop crying stop crying stop crying stop crying.
48. Let it go. Let her go.
51. Download Tinder.
52. Rip up the love letter you wrote but couldn’t give her because you’re a coward and it wouldn’t have changed anything anyway.
53. Go to a lesbian bar alone on Valentine’s Day. Drink five rum and cokes as fast as you can so you can’t feel. Dance with multiple girls. Think about dancing with her in her kitchen while the cookies are in the oven. Walk outside for some air. It’s empty. There is an arcade-style basketball game. Pick up a ball and start shooting. Shoot the balls over and over until you’re practically throwing the ball into the board. It’s so loud when the ball crashes. And you’re just hammering at it until you hear people approaching. They look at you, study you. What are they seeing? They ask if they can shoot hoops with you, and you say yes. It’s a group of couples and they ask if you came here alone. When you say yes, they are shocked. They could never. They think you are very brave. Laugh and say, “I’m my own best time.”
54. Place your knuckles against the wall in the bathroom and scrape them back and forth, harder and harder until your breathing is heavy. Till your knuckles are red and raw.
55. Go home alone and pick up the tattered pieces of paper on the floor. Put them in a Ziploc bag. Seal it and hide in your drawer.
56. Go on a first date with a perfectly nice girl the next day. Cry before and after the date.
57. Delete Tinder.
58. Start drinking every night.
59. Walk up the stairs to the top floor of your apartment complex’s parking garage. Stare into the dark sky. Look down below at all the cars on the third floor. Stretch for two minutes and then sprint from one end of the roof to the other.
60. Lay down and stare at the ceiling fan the night before your flight to New Jersey. Wait for the panic to come. It never does.
61. Get dressed for soccer tryouts. Put on your lucky socks and breathe deep. Do a warmup. Get the nerves out.
62. Break your foot on the 25^th minute of the first 30-minute match of the day.
63. Try to get up from the ground. Your foot completely gives out on you, and you fall forward. The girl from the other team catches you. Feel the tears swell. She helps pull you up and out of the field and places you on a bench. She gets an ice pack for you. You can’t walk, and you realize in that moment that everything you have worked for in the past two months is gone. Every time you were upset about her, you’d go for a run. Your sprints on top of the garage. The salmon salads, nights alone at the gym, the bike rides, the soccer coaches teaching you new skills. Everything you’ve done to get over her is gone. So is your chance at making the soccer team.
64. Wait all day to get to the hotel room so you can cry. Get in the shower. When the water hits you, nothing comes out.
65. Fly back home.
66. Go to the doctor and get the official diagnosis. They don’t know if and when you can play soccer again. Your bones are broken, and you need to walk in a medical boot for the next 5 weeks.
67. Lay on your friend’s couch that night and think about how all you want is for her to come over and play with your hair. Hear her say, “why did you take so long so go to the doctor, babe?”
68. Keep drinking.
69. Throw away the love orchid. You don’t want to, but its dead. It’s been dead for two months. You have to let it go. The cactus for her side of the bed is still alive. So are you, and it’s all yours now.
70. Get canceled on an hour before another set-up date. Laugh and go to the bar with your friends and get stupid drunk. Your foot hurts so bad.
71. Look at yourself in the mirror and see the way your face is changing. It’s bloated.
72. Fall to your knees on the old carpet in the living room and cry because you broke your foot, and now you have a wound everyone can see. A wound that makes sense. Everyone tells you it takes time to heal. Listen to the doctor: don’t put weight on your foot. Wear the immobilized boot for five weeks. In eight weeks, your cracked bones should heal. And you’re frustrated and aggravated by the boot because it doesn’t leave you. You struggle with it in the shower. You struggle with it before bed and while sleeping. It never leaves your side. When you wake up in the morning, it’s there facing you. She’s the wound that never gives you a minute to breathe. But they can’t see that. All they see is a broken foot.
73. Stop drinking.
74. See your therapist frequently. She says you don’t have to carry this pain alone.
75. No drinking, no running, no soccer, no weight lifting. There are no ways to distract yourself.
76. Let the feelings go through you. All of the them. The hurt, the jealously, the rage. The arguments in your mind you will never speak. The hope. The life that you were building. It’s gone.
77. Go a day without crying.
78. Go several days without crying.
79. Put the lucky socks underneath the ripped note in the Ziploc bag in your top drawer.
80. Walk in the morning. Walk during lunch. Walk at night.
81. Dance across your 700-square-foot apartment, naked with the boot on.
82. Dream that you are a terra-cotta statue under water. Try your hardest to pull yourself out until you drown.
83. Dream that you are on a roller coaster and they are in the seat behind you. Scream so loud your neighbor hits the wall and tells you to shut the fuck up.
84. Spend a day listening to all your old records.
85. Go to brunch for a friend’s birthday. The 7-year-old is there. Scoop her up into your arms and twirl her around until she yells out, “Faster, faster, Vanessa!”
86. Talk and talk and talk till you can’t talk anymore.
87. Go two weeks without crying.
88. Binge watch The L Word and get furious at Bette for cheating on Tina, for cheating on Jodi, and for having the audacity to cry about it.
89. Find a workout video that is specifically designed for people with a broken foot.
90. Do the hurt-foot work out every other day. Start to feel the strength slowly return to your body.
91. Hear from girls you’ve dated before her. One tells you that she cares about you and always will. One says she hopes you are healing and resting your foot. One says she’ll never forget the good times you two had. Another asks for new book recommendations.
92. Run into the same girl like 20 times while walking your dog. Find out her name is Clarissa and she likes to paint her toenails red. One day she spills her life out to you, and for the first time in four months you feel like it’s possible to have a connection.
93. Notice your body is changing again. You are starting to lose the beer weight.
94. Start making jokes about you and the boot. It’s a love affair.
95. Look at yourself in the mirror constantly. Search for some deeper meaning in your eyes. They’re just brown, but they are also not nothing.
96. Let your eyebrows get super bushy like Cara Delevingne, just a little less supermodel.
97. Start reading new books and making new friends. Worry whether the new ones can still any of the pain left behind. If they do, no one says anything.
99. Stand outside in line for an hour at a bike shop. It’s been a few weeks without a boot, and you can stand on your own now without problems. Buy yourself the smallest bike they have available. Take it outside into the mostly empty parking lot of the shopping center. Hop on the bike and just go. Go in circles around the lot and start laughing. Laugh so fucking loud that onlookers stare at you. Your heart is beating wildly. Pedal faster and faster until the tears dry against your cheek. Pedal faster and faster until she’s gone and out of you. Pedal faster and faster until you’re the only one you need.

 

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Vanessa Escobar is a 31-year old living the corporate America life but always dreaming of something more. She’s in love with the city of Houston despite no desire to live in the south. She has a nefarious escape artist dog named Stella and writes about the moments in life that leave you reeling. You can find her on Instagram @nessacobar or escobarvanessa.com

Rachel Futterman is a graphic designer and illustrator living in Brooklyn, New York. Her drawings, like humans, are made of light and dark. You can find more of her work at rfutterm.myportfolio.com