Please, don’t ever break a writer’s heart. Breakups with a writer are of a different breed. Breaking her heart is not the same as the casual breakup with the sorority girl or the anger-fueled split with the girl who you met at that bonfire and got bored of after a few months. It is not the same as breakups between you and the girl who you thought that you’d spend forever with. Breaking a writer’s heart is a world all its own.
Writers handle endings with dignity. She is mature enough to realize that life goes on, that people leave, and that not everyone is meant to stay forever. She will miss you, but that’s all. She will not try to reopen your story in a sorry effort to rewrite or erase the ending, because she knows better than anyone that once a book is closed, it shouldn’t be reopened. However, she will never stop thinking about that love story because, to her, it was the best story ever told.
Instead of reopening the old book, writers create new stories. Some of these stories will not include you. It will involve her building a life without you in it and standing on her own two feet without your inspiration to ease her through life like you did for so long. Other stories, however, will include you. She will write about how your eyes used to shine when you talked about the future or how they used to remind her of the summer day blue skies from the months that you spent together. However, now they remind her of something else, something that makes her heart hurt and her hands shake on the keys.
The truth of the situation is that writers fall harder. They love deeper than anyone and if they fall in love with you, they love everything that you are. When it came to you, that was just it. She loved you. If you break her, you will live on in her words. That's both a blessing and a curse.
If you expect her to try to get back at you, to lower herself enough to speak words of malice about you and everything you are, don’t waste your time. She is not that kind of girl. She will remain silent, but her silence, my friend, speaks volumes. If she ever decides to break her silence, prepare for it. She is not trying to start a fight or reopen your book, riddled with old wounds. She is simply telling a story. It’s not her fault that she’s good at it.
You will miss her. Maybe not now and maybe not yet, but you will. Why is that? She always had a certain patience with you, a kindness about her that even you were willing to admit was different from anything that you had ever experienced before her. She developed that patience after years of writing, waiting for inspiration to strike. She had wit. Sure, she was stuck in her own head a lot and stuck in her emotions, as writers often are, but she could make you laugh whenever, wherever. You will miss how she made you her story. You will miss how observant she was, detecting a change in mood in a second and doing all that she could to make sure that you were OK in a way that no one else could: charming you with eloquently-written compliments and beautiful words.
She is a writer and you will never have another love like her. Please don’t break her heart. If you happen to break her, remember that writers are experts at endings.
