Essay on heartbreak: The one where you meet the bee doctor, cry a lot and dream of progress
On saturdays the bee doctor climbed up on the roof of the bike shed, where the bees lived. You loved the term bee doctor, it sounded so much more caring than apiarist. Beekeeper was fine, too. But you found bee doctor nicer. His name was Maxime. The bees swarming around him, he examined every single one of the dozen of trays. Carefully lifting the wood, carefully turning, precisely looking for things you didn’t know and precisely tucking the tray back.
I want someone who cares for me like Maxime does for the bees, you thought.
Well, not someone who is paid to visit you, obviously. But someone who stops by every single saturday. Someone who is not creating its life around you but integrating you in it. Counting on you. Like a cake is not about egg, not about butter or flour. But without it, it’s significantly different. Not worse or better. Just different.
Does he get stung? Do the bees know he is good to them?
From your place at the window you could watch Maxime easily while picking the strings on your Gibson that made your fingertips feel like you touched a sun person. The song you had in mind and which you kept playing just stuck with you. Imprinted on your temporal cortex.
It also made you cry in front of the deep frozen Pizzas at the supermarket yesterday, but that was arbitrary. At least you wished it was. You went out and stood in the sun for a second. The light made its way through the houses and onto a piece of the parking lot you were standing on.
The afternoon and evening you spent crying in your room. When you went to the kitchen to prepare some dinner and your flatmate asked whether you needed a hug, you started crying so heavy, that the tears fell on the wooden floor in front of the oven.
The next day your eyes were a disaster and your head hurt, badly. There’s that. But your friend took you to play soccer in the church garden. She was the first person that didn’t make you feel bad about your concerning lack of ability to behave sportive around a ball.
What remained? Now that all the quotes, all the songs you shared with her, everything that made you think of her made her think of someone else? The songs you wrote or covered for her she listened to imagining herself as the lyrical me and the “you” was not you but another woman?
First and foremost, there was a lot of - let me tell you that - a lot of anger. But after that? There was just a collection of songs, natural phenomenons, foods and smells you would never connect with someone else than her again. At last the memories. That sneaked up on you like hick ups. Unexpected and seldom but then, mostly, in rows, that you violently had to shut down, with the strangest coping mechanisms. Drinking a glass of water upside down or doing a handstand. Smashing things, crying heavily in public places or getting sick and not eating the rest of the day.
So, what remained?
Bright red and blue socks. The scratchy black wool jumper Lisa gave you. Good books that made you laugh or cry. Strangers smiling at you. The sun, rising and setting, in all her colors. Moving you to tears, to dance, to get angry – music. The clouds, forming shapes, like apples or glasses. The ripples on the water that visualized the touch of the wind and stream. Deep dark grey and blue colors on a sky that was about to burst into rain falls. Ice cream and champagne, fresh pizza and bread, also Mango, a very mentionable contestant. The laugh of your friend Christine. Swans bitching about the ducks and hunting them. Unexpected compliments of strangers or friends. The elder tree hanging over the canal, that got bleached out by the sun, so it turned from deep purple to rose and to white eventually. And like the tree’s blossoms lost their color, her color, the pain in you faded. Ever so gently, ever so silent. It packed its bags. And sometimes it came back, because it realized it forgot something. So you dug it up. And you let it hurt.
One day, you would hear her name in the mouth of someone else. One day, you would smell her perfume on a stranger or in the drug store. You stopped in your tracks, waiting for the pain to hit you. Bracing for impact. But it had gone. Its room empty and cleaned, the door closed.
Today was not that day. But you knew that day would come, with certainty. So why hurry or slow it down? It would reach you, either way.
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