If you’re anything like me, the “All Too Well” (1o Minute Version) wrecked you.
It took me two days to think about texting him. The last I saw of him was close to midnight, in the sticky summer evening heat that accompanies July in New England.
We decided to not be friends since we never even were, friends that is. We kissed across each other’s inner thighs but never did find out what it felt like to sleep beside the breath of one another.
Our alternative was to be humans who loved Taylor and discussed new albums as they dropped. So, there we were, on a Vermont park bench. Me, desperately in love with the idea of him. Him, using me for the attention high as his girlfriend slept.
I hadn’t yet felt real love. The kind that’s soft in its strength and brings with it a type of togetherness that is both respectful and present and lacks intentional pain. It’s because of this love that I can let heartache move from my soul to right here on the page.
Here’s the story of P. Hollow ruining me.
The beginning
The holiday’s craned their necks around the corner of our weekend plans as he approached my table. On a Sunday evening at our local co-op, everything in the room went dark but you.
Not days later and we’re at a Taylor Swift drag sing-off and I’m sitting next to you when I notice the red flag pinned to your back, hanging at half-mast for a love that is not me. The snow guides me to my car early and you call me within the hour.
You are on my living room floor. You use my mouthwash and Chapstick. We are an ornament hanging between the reality that you are not ready, and I am incapable of breaking my own fall.
Icicle memory
I can see my breath as you notice my winter hat. You pull a U-turn to pick me up on a dead-end street and I didn’t see this for the spoiler it was. We find the whale’s tails and I muddy my suede boots that you swear you’ll clean. It’s the only promise you ever kept.
We kiss, but not when you thought we would. At first, I pulled away. At the very last second. Just to drive you rabbit hole mad. Because there was always string around the finger strategy.
I remember thinking your lips didn’t feel at all what I built them up to be in my head. You claim I was too forceful. All speed and no pleasure. I break off as many pieces of me as I can. Wear too much perfume in the hopes I’ll stick to you.
The shattering
It’s January and shampoo makes its way into my eyes as I make my way to the phone. You’ve called me twice now, mid-shower, and my voicemail was not sufficient for your resort panic attack. I still believe you’d soak your bathroom tile just to speak to me.
I know your teeth are just a bit too big for your mouth. The same way I know you said you loved me the night before you left. I just can’t remember it now.
It all blurs together here. When you kicked me out of your bed, and we deleted everything. Purged all the evidence like last night’s dinner. If we throw it up or out the calories don’t count, the memories turn to fiction.
Then there were eight months of silence, shotgun prayers, and puffy cheeks from trying to will your touch out of me.
This isn’t the end. There’s truly so much more back and forth I could list out like a recipe with oh so many steps. But I stopped it here because this is when I finally started to understand that he wasn’t ever going to be kind to me. He never was, not even at the start.
And the start is when I believe we see someone for who they truly are.
I know day one if I can love someone and people have always found that to be wild, crazy even. But the very start of knowing a person is the only time we have a perfect 20/20 vision for them.
Afterward, everything comes in and clouds it: the memories, our grudges, favorite ticks of a person. The awareness we hold provides knowledge, but never clarity.
At the start of the heartbreak, there wasn’t yet snow on the ground. I’d beg for his attention and he’d ignore my calls. Now, years later, I’m filled with ambiguous grief.
The death of my mother irrevocably ruined me. It wasn’t even simply her dying that wrecked me at the core. It was all the information I learned about after her death. Each and every supposed truth of hers, told to me by anyone but her. All the memories I learned she’d never become a part of and all the ones of her I couldn’t hold on to as time pressed on.
Even 15 years later, I’m more shatter than I am glass. I’m pieces you find on the floor days or weeks after you dropped that plate and you wonder how you could have missed them. The pieces.
P. Hollow taught me that death is not the cruelest part of life. Silence is.
Ambiguous grief is the grief we hold for someone who is still alive. To this day, he holds the answers to each of my questions. He, unlike my mother, is not ash. Right now, in this very moment, his body is intaking oxygen and that fact is one of the most frustrating elements I’ve come to learn I have to accept.
If you’re anything like me and have experienced the ever-present bruise of a mistaken twin flame, friendship, romantic, or otherwise, then you know how maddening it is to have no collective processing or shared mourning.
It’s the carrying of a body bag everywhere you go. The fixation turns to rage and serves as a continued link between you and them. Because even though you may not have asked to carry this grief with you every hour of every day, you aren’t willing to completely disconnect from them. So, we find ways to keep them close, even if those moments look like out-of-the-blue texts and bathroom breakdowns.
And if this doesn’t sound like a familiar lived experience for you, then maybe you’re someone’s P. Hollow and I say that with such understanding. I’m someone’s total agony rolled up into a body that is still breathing and I’m not sure if there’s anything I could have done to hurt them less. Accepting this role I played helped me to better understand my and every other P. Hollow out there.
My mother was and will forever be the love of my life. Losing her broke me irreparably. P. Hollow, however, taught me that loving someone should feel nothing like the ache of another who is already gone. And while so many of us have stayed tethered to those who’ve had our backs to us no matter how hard we’ve pulled, I’m not sure deep feelers, like writers, for example, get a choice in the tethering.
I think for some it looks like a clasp that can be disconnected and for us, the thick skin and exposed hearted it’s more a lock with a never-made key.
And as I sit here writing this, I’m in the state my boyfriend calls home, knowing full well he’ll call me as he drives back from work. That peace, that calm ocean bed, is a love I haven’t felt since my mother’s passing and it is one of the few things that makes me feel closer to her. Not the chaos. The serenity.
This moment is what I’d hoped and always knew would come, just never from P. Hollow. And while Taylor’s ten-year later throwback heartbreak album stirred up quite a few emotions for me and countless others, the memories are not worth resuscitating. And I like to believe Miss Swift holds a similar truth in her back pocket.
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Written by Tori Muzyk
Illustrated by Francesca Mariama
