I met a woman at a bar – The Bombay Bicycle Club in Cape Town. I was wearing a big red bow on my head – I found it weaving my way back from the bathroom; a friend was speaking Swedish to anyone who would listen; her boyfriend was inhaling his Fettucini Fantasia, and this new friend and I were playing a divorce ditty on the bell above the bar.

Somehow surrounded by people who have all been going through divorce – one guy as young as twenty-eight! – it was polled that the grief and heartbreak you experience when getting divorced or splitting from your significant long-term partner is nowhere near the broken-hearted mess you become after the person directly afterwards leaves you. And my new friend decided, after talking to me, that she just might want to avoid falling in love again altogether … and with my manic grieving process who the hell can blame her!

It ultimately all boils down to those choices. I had choices when breaking up my marriage. I could have let go immediately but I chose to fight for years before realizing I was never going to be chosen and my stubborn side refused to believe it for so long that I delayed the inevitable and caused myself (and probably my whole family) a hell of a lot of unnecessary trauma in the process. We’d been together since god was a child; he was my best friend, and I kinda thought it would look bad if I had a failed marriage on top of having recently thrown in my career towel when I couldn’t come to grips with how depressed I was being a mother. I was attached and, yes, maybe the attachment was to several too many of the wrong things. The relationship had, after all, been fizzling out for a few years when it became all too clear that the power had shifted and I was not as significant an Other as I desired.

In an attempt to let him go, I wrote, I partied, I ran (and then some), I rang the bell and I slept out at friends more often than at home.

I have come full circle, except this time the heartache is more acute, having broken up at the explosion of love rather than in the smoky aftermath. It took a friend of mine recently to point out that I just don’t do things in half measures – all or nothing – and a little retrospective look revealed how I had been trying to squeeze myself into little spaces he had created for me in his life. My life, in contrast, was wide open to him and he chose not to fill any of the space.

So I have just repeated the pattern: I chose a new man to love who had tiny spaces in his life which I just never fit into … You think maybe it’s because my wings just got too big? Maybe I just want to be picked for the team or maybe the reason I run is because I don’t want to not be picked.

And, having come full circle, I repeat my process with the exact same coping mechanisms: again I write, I party, I run (and then some), I ring the bell and I sleep out at friends as often as possible in an attempt to wrap myself in the love I am perhaps recognizing finally as the more sustainable and worthwhile reflection of love there is. My coping mechanisms may have stayed the same but the grieving process is happening far quicker … no doubt because my lover is halfway across the world with his family and Absence does not, in my case, make the Heart Fonder … especially under the circumstances.

A friend said it was time to fall in love with myself and the rest would follow. It’s all about practice. You learn what you can handle, you learn what’s in your best interests and you just ‘lite’n up. Am I learning to let go easier or am I simply recognizing that when others let go, I need to accept defeat and walk away. It hurts to walk away from bliss … but when the split happens, it’s time to acknowledge that the bliss is now simply living in yesterdays that no longer exist. There is a time when all romance has to make way for reality.

The journey is all I have now to remember … it’s all I have and it will have to be enough. The destination may not be the one I chose but it’s the place I’m meant to be.