This is a combination post, the two requests posed as Rethoughts were “addiction vs. love,” and “how to get over a break up,” which I think go hand-in-hand. Rethoughts is not a website for “how-to’s,” which is partially why it took me so long to write this one. For one thing, I can’t point to a single step I took to mourn any of my relationships. For another, I don’t think those steps would help you anyway.

About a year ago I helped my brother make a video. He doesn’t usually ask me for help unless he’s working on something more heartfelt than he’s used to. He sent me a few songs that he was going to use and told me to think of the pain of a breakup so he could set the tone for whatever I ended up writing. I let him read through several poems that I’d written a few years before when I was going through my last breakup. One line stuck out to him “I am consumed by a memory.” He told me “that’s what I want but I need more.” The next line was “a ghost in passing,” reminding me of mourning a death. A breakup is the death of a relationship and we are required to mourn not only the memories we make but the potential, too. We, these anticipatory creatures, must suffer through remembering that which happened and that which never will. That became the theme of the video; consumed by a memory that I have not yet made. It turns out that love and addiction are very similar. Let me clarify, ROMANTIC love and addiction are nearly identical in that they follow the same neural pathways in the brain. We also show symptoms of withdrawal from love just like we’d experience in addiction. So which is it, are we like widows and widowers of the ideas of a lover, or are we junkies coming off a high? I think it’s a little of both. Love is unique in that it has a special side effect of insanity that new users quickly show symptoms of, and there’s no known cure, no treatment, no separation from it. There are few things in our human experience that can drive even the most rational person into madness like a broken heart. We are tethered, domesticated by it and giving up our wild dreams for one more taste and the only wild we know is the gnashing of our teeth until we get more. Not out of our wildness, but just another symptom.