I wrote a romantic fantasy for myself to cope with my fear and vulnerability. Would it hold?. It was, without question, the worst thing that has ever happened to me. Which is a bold claim about a breakup with someone I’d known for all of 18 months. I can be a little dramatic sometimes. But honestly? Not about this. I have never known agony like it. An older pain, the kind caused by far more shocking blows dealt to me in the past, seemed to lie dormant in my bones until the anguish of heartbreak reanimated it. I felt all of it – the old pain and the new – erupt at once. My body was burnt up by it.
![[Writer Shon Faye, arm up as she leans against a wall, wearing white shirt and black jacket and trousers]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/9be9d6833c75cb2373f9dbcff9ec4f000256b65b/0_0_5236_7331/master/5236.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
In part, the devastation was caused by the rupture catching me unaware, like a natural disaster no one sees coming. It had been my private little earthquake, and it razed me to the ground. Many of us have experienced this kind of breakup. The kind that nothing prepares you for. The kind that leaves you existentially unstable. The kind where the only reasonable response to the first note of an Adele song on BBC Radio 2 is to wrench the car radio out by brute force and toss it out of the window.
The memory of my Google search history from that time still makes me wince: “Breakup. Am I dying?” “How long to get over ex?” “Getting back with ex.” “Why is love not enough?” Every unoccupied moment was spent dividing my entire life story into before and after, obsessively replaying the sweet times, trying to find the pivotal moments I wished I could reach back to and change, surveying the extent of what I had lost, the wrecked landscape of my new reality.
