Writing Off Your Ex
By Jan Karlo Lopez
photo by Jeylan Jones
It’s your movie, write off whom you want. Tell everyone, including yourself, that they died. Anyone who asks understands because ironically the only guidance given on a breakup is to not speak on the break-up. Your friend that’s fucking their ex will implore you not to fuck yours. Your friend who drunk dials their ex will suggest you block their number. Your friend who cheats will pray you find someone new and settle down like they did. Your friend that’s a bigger piece of shit than you will beg you to forget about your ex while they try to fuck them behind your back. Your single friends will encourage you to enjoy yourself while they secretly fantasize about what could’ve been. Unwarranted advice from unwanted advisors. It’s your movie to cast and your cast to kill off as you see fit. Storylines can be cut but life isn’t a sitcom where things return to normal after every episode.
You need a catalyst to ignite the decomposing process to bleach the stain of their existence from your life. Deleting pictures and trashing things are surface-level steps. Convince yourself they’re fucking the only person you saw them around, or that follower always liking their pictures(that’s getting more attention by the post). Maybe a new neighbor they bumped into after coming home from a date they matched with on a dating app. They reactivated that account, you haven’t seen it for yourself but vividly imagine every detail because it’s true. If not, why delete you from their social media? That’s the green light for those trying. Those friends provide a shoulder to cry on and a bed to lie in. Rebounds turn into regrets.
Do what any sane person does while heartbroken. Try to fuck their best friend, their cousin, or their sibling. Lay the groundwork. Find common interests and summon them. Think of their friends, which one gave you that look, or held that hug a bit too long? When you’re wrong you can’t do much worse besides get caught. None of it matters because it isn’t going to simplify anything, you want them to know. You’re used to getting caught up. You’re not used to being faithful. There’s no positive outcome, you want them to hurt, but never admit your pain. Even though you were cheating too, two wrongs don’t make a right, only one endless cycle of mistakes that you will trundle through life with. Why rebuild the wheel? Why tread a different path? You know how it ends, enjoy the story and cross your fingers for a plot twist.
Confirm what you know you’ve known the whole time. You two have been separated for months but it still counts. Take note of the angles from their recent posts to determine the height of who could’ve taken it, and read the subtext of the caption to decipher how it’s directed towards you. Check the interactions to pick the top candidates and rank them in order of who probably did, who maybe will, and who is. Wait for it because it’s coming, even if it doesn’t, create the event in your head. Replay it until it’s in 4K. Pick a face to place in the picture you’re painting of them. Because being with you is execrable there has to be an escape plan with an accomplice. When it happens, because there’s always someone after you, it’s still shocking, and your heart drops some degrees and the wall grows some inches. The opposite sex becomes the opposition believing revenge brings peace and happiness to relax in languor.
Even when it’s not, tell yourself it’s okay, if you say otherwise, you have a problem. And you can’t have problems right now, you need fun right now. Do the things you said you didn’t like doing with people you said you didn’t like doing them with. It’s all performance art to post later. Downplay the relationship to minimize the impact of the breakup. Exaggerate your single life to overcompensate for the void. You can’t be honest with yourself. You’ve mastered that. You’ve been through this before, even so, practice can’t prepare you for the pain. It’s different every time. Pieces stay and bond with the old scars, becoming one wound.
Then a kairos comes from the crack in your heart and the pain fuels and pushes you over this hump. Trade in those nights at the bar for mornings at the gym, because those fun nights are showing physically and financially, and from what you can remember, they didn’t seem fun. Your break-up playlist doesn’t hit the same during your workout so you’re forced to listen to music that puts you in a better mood. You get the right amount of sleep, waking up sprightly and not wasting mornings recovering from a hangover. Your energy levels rise, and you almost catch a natural high but it’s hard to tell through the herbal one so you sober up, for a few days. People stop seeing you out. No one knows where you’re at, including yourself. Access to you is limited. People try more, others try less. You don’t try at all, mentally stagnant while distracting yourself by growing financially.
Your selective memory fades and the mind becomes limpid, finding all the pieces to put together the image of the failed relationship. The flaws on both sides of the spectrum. Those small differences led to bigger issues. Their words sit with you and do not weigh you down. Reflect but don’t react, let the feelings resonate. Don’t spend mornings going through conversations you should’ve had, controlling both sides, creating various versions with different variables with unrealistic outcomes—a field of “what ifs” to wander in forever. Let the regular anxieties of life occupy your mind. No matter your relationship status, there’s always something in your head, now there’s one less voice.
And at last, you finally take the advice every ex abandons you with and go to therapy because it’s easy to spot the common denominator. When solving a problem, they don’t tell you that after admitting you have one, you source for the closest elucidation, where you are the problem. Attempts to change your mind are futile. There is no paucity of blame to place when one becomes venturesome in their morass mind. Days are distraughtly wasted; replaying and recreating memories that never happened. Scenarios that consistently change. Facilitating a jaundiced environment for falsehoods to flourish.
You look at everything you could’ve done right to make it work with [insert ex’s name] because in your mind they could’ve been the one; had they stayed. Meaning if they left, they weren’t? You can’t switch out Main Characters and expect no one to notice. They can leave but they have to return because they matter to the overall story. You’ve been treating people like main characters when they’re last season’s content. But you can’t tell them you need filler episodes, fluffers; something to do while you look for something to do. You know better but you’re still bitter.
That bitterness fades when you accept that you two had a season finale, and now they’re getting their spinoff. An opportunity for them to make their own choices, their own mistakes, and a chance at happiness. While there’s a window for you to climb through for your guest appearance you realize that there’s no need for your comeback. Your character doesn’t serve a purpose aside from callbacks to previous episodes. The feelings don’t fade but they settle. You laugh at the memory when you thought it was the end when in reality, it was the intro to your next season.
Jan Karlo Lopez is a pathological liar turned writer. His self-published short-story anthologies have generated over a thousand dollars of revenue on GumRoad. The profits have been donated to a foundation that buys shoes for underprivileged kids in the Oak Cliff community and purchased items for teachers based in Oak Cliff schools. Jan Karlo is Oak Cliff born, raised, and resident. He has been published in Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, In Parentheses, and Thirty West Publishing House.
Jeylan Jones, a Houston native living in Minnesota, writes and photographs the world in his free time while programming by trade. He fashions everything from poetry to screenplays and will usually be spotted walking his black lab by the Mississippi River.
