That’s right folks. even though we are hard at work on writing a book about the heartbroke daily and working on a screenplay, we are still accepting and publishing user-submitted stories of heartbreak. As if to prove my point, today, we have not one, not two, but three new stories. Please feel free to send feedback or leave comments for the authors.
Yours,
Knox Dupree
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letter to a black hole
A reader, who should remain anonymous, sent this letter simply to share with me, but I, being the voyeur that I am, felt it too raw not to publish. I was especially touched by writer’s profound awareness of her situation. How no resolution will come. And how much that hurts. Enjoy.
Dear ex-boyfriend,
Happy birthday. I wish I could send this to you. I miss you. I have been dating… a lot actually and every one of them makes me miss you. They all are missing something… and I think I know what it is. They are not you. They are either not as funny, not as smart, or don’t have a beard, or don’t know our inside jokes. I know this is totally unfair to them. How are they supposed to make up for the comparison to a 3 year relationship? I don’t know, I think that I will never be able to let any of them in. I don’t know that I want to. I wish I could forget about you.. I wish that so many things did not remind me of you. I went to the baseball game and I swear I turned around and thought that you would be next to me. How sad is that? How stupid am I? Every time I think of you I hate myself a little more. I am planning on leaving Michigan to get away from our memories. I cannot take it. I can’t stand only being 10 minutes away from you. I cringe every time I come to your city. I cringe when I see photos of you. I cringe when I have to do things that I thought we would be doing together. I hate being there and you are not. I cannot wait to get out of here. I hope it will ease the memories if I am not constantly around the things that we did together. Sometimes I hate hearing songs that remind me of us. I have to skip a lot of songs on my ipod. The one that you gave me. Even when I hear new bands or songs I think man I wish I could tell you about this band, I think you would like them.
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I’ll tell you right now that this story is longer than anything I would normally publish. And if it were not for the generous evocation of New Orleans, I wouldn’t have published it. However, I really enjoyed reading this writer, who wanted to be credited as The Eternal Summer of Hobeaux, come to terms with the impossibility of a brightly burning infatuation and the way it still lingers over him. I assure you, that doesn’t give anything away. If you have the time, read it.
She laughed at me. It wasn’t an isolated incident, mind you. She laughed many times that afternoon. But this was the first time. This time it was special it sounded perfect, the way she laughed as hard as you can when you’ve got a seatbelt on in a car driving over streets that haven’t been paved since Ford was President and you’re experiencing something completely new.
Continue reading ‘Jessica, the girl who wants to save the world’
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Brandon, the first love
This is another anonymous story of early love. I don’t know why so many submissions to the heartbroke daily involve the ones who made the first impression of serious heartbreak. I know the old saying, ‘the first cut is the deepest’, but I always thought that was bullshit. To me the deepests cuts are the ones that trace over long-healed scars, the latter heartbreaks we go through, when we thought we were already too old to go through it again. But maybe I’m just unlucky. Regardless, enjoy.
Brandon offered to fix my keychain on my very first day of college. I walked into my friend Katie’s dorm room like a damsel in distress, complaining that I had already broken my identification keychain and it was only my first day. Had I known I would be meeting my future boyfriend at that moment I may have rethought the Hello Kitty pajamas, soaking wet hair and glasses. Luckily Brandon found my ensemble endearing and we immediately began spending every waking second together on campus. I always told him he had the warmest eyes I had ever seen. Deep brown speckled with honey flecks around his iris, the eyes attached to the boy never ceased to bring a warm blush to my cheek.
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Stella, the worst road trip ever
“How can you eat that shit? You know it’s filled with dried pig anuses and cow ankle fat, right?” She’s referring to the pepperoni stick I’m chewing on.
Bozeman was disappearing behind us. I’d found a cassette of Springsteen’s Nebraska at the last Texaco. The close-to-setting sun was painting the sky a sentimental color. I should have felt great. But then Stella had to come in and ruin the moment.
“How can I eat it?” I say. “One bite at at time, like anything else.”
“You don’t think about where it comes from at all?”
I take a melodramatic breath and look over at her. “I only eat jerky when I go on road trips. But, I ALWAYS eat jerky when I go on road trips. And no, I try not to think about where my food came from, really ever.”
“Well don’t think you’re going to be kissing me with your pepperoni breath.”
“I’ll pick up some gum next time we refill. Will you kiss me then?” I said.
“Depends on the flavor.” She says, in a way where I couldn’t tell if she was kidding or not. Jesus, I thought, only 1200 more miles to Chicago. Continue reading ‘Stella, the worst road trip ever’
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ask Knox: booty call conflict
Hey Knox,
I recently got a text from an out-of-town-fuck-buddy, who says shes going to be in my city next weekend. Normally, I’d be really excited about seeing her, but I just got serious with someone else, and I don’t think it’d be appropriate to hang out with the out-of-towner, who is going to have some obvious expectations. I don’t know whether I should cop to the fact that I’m seeing somebody, or if I should just avoid her outright. Any thoughts?
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Andrea, the clean slate
The door cracks quietly, as she lets herself out. It’s 5 AM.
I doze for another six hours. When I awake, my head throbs. The summer heat in my basement apartment is already unbearable. I limp to the kitchen, pull a bottle of vodka out of the freezer and try to recall last nights bender.
It started at an old colleagues book release party. Well, to be honest, it started in this very kitchen, hours before the party, with the first half of this very bottle of vodka, listening to ‘Diz and Getz’ on repeat. I arrived at the party already drunk, but in a classy, jolly way, not belligerent. I don’t recall any outbursts, or disapproving looks. In fact, I believe I might have been in fine form.
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site news: hiatus
As many of you may have noticed, I haven’t been updating the site with any regularity over the past few weeks. 
Well to answer many of your concerned questions all at once, no, I am not dead. Emotionally, maybe, but physically, I am still very much alive.
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Bernadette, the witch doctor
Bernadette hated my guts growing up. I suppose I can see why. I did break up with her just before our Fall Seventh Grade Activity Night/dance. In my defense, I was only 12 – and besides, I was really, really high on acid at the time and she just wouldn’t stop talking. Everything in me said that I was in no place to cater to someone else’s emotional needs because, after all, I was way too fucked up – in the moment and otherwise. I had to take action, and it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.
I’m not sure what a “normal” reaction to breakup is when you’re a 12-year-old girl, but I do know hers was pretty fucking weird. She and a few friends got on the Internet and researched voodoo rituals, particularly voodoo dolls, and they created a little Knox doll that, I heard, was abused in untold ways.
I don’t think much of Santeria when practiced by adolescent white girls in a small, American city north of, say, Jackson, MI. Still. . . there’s something unnerving about a gaggle of one’s peers trying to castrate him through supernatural means. Just thinking about it made me uneasy. I had a couple of terrible dreams, too – somewhat of an adolescent reverse-wet dream.
Walking past them in the hallways, they’d snicker among themselves and I’d feel creeped out. Even hurt. But most of all, I was annoyed. I mean, c’mon—we only “went out” for a few weeks. We kissed in the back of a YMCA van. She was a terrible kisser, which made me mostly uninterested in whatever else she was bad at, and besides, her mom looked like Michael Jackson, from the cover of Thriller. I don’t deserve this shit, damnit.
Much to their—and I suspect many others’—chagrin, the voodoo rituals didn’t work on my man parts. It sure would have made adolescence easier if they had. And I often get to wondering what my life would have been like if I lacked the ability to please a woman. Certainly, you wouldn’t be reading this now.
Continue reading ‘Bernadette, the witch doctor’
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Lilly, the pupil
I was teaching creative writing, part-time, at a private high school down in Palo Alto. The gig felt pretty humiliating. Here I was – in my mind, one of the premier literary voices of my generation – reduced to helping the children of privilege express their petty, overwrought dissatisfactions with life or, alternately, craft an admissions essay to the earn them a spot at one of our nation’s elite universities. Needless to say, I drank often.
Lilly didn’t seem much different from the rest of my students. At least, at first. She was small, introverted and seemed to harbor an inordinate amount of undirected rage. Midway through the year, though, she turned in an assignment on future goals entitled, “Why My Life Sucks.” When I started to read it, I thought, ‘here we go, again.’ The story however, wasn’t about adolescent melancholia, but was supposedly written in MY voice, about my own dissatisfaction with life.
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Got this audio in the mail the other day. Nothing by way of link or artist info, but it’s a fine piece.
I had a federal work-study job in college, one of three jobs that year. In the afternoons I was an administrative assistant. I navigated students through the culture of the administration.
This girl walks into the office one afternoon. She’s wearing her amber hair loosely in a bun, a spaghetti strap white linen dress flowing flawlessly with at her knees, flapping sandals, and thick, large black sunglasses, the type girls wear hide their ugliness behind them. She looks like a honeybee.
Her name is Emily. She’s from L.A. She’s new to the city. She slowly lifts her sunglasses up, resting them on top of her hair. She’s gorgeous, a crush against my will. She’s completely lost. Doesn’t know how or where to register for classes.
It was a beautiful day and she was a beautiful girl, so I tell her and her sister (I am guessing she was around as chaperon), I’ll walk them to the building where Emily can register.
We talk. Her father is an investment banker. He has put her up with an apartment in midtown with her chaperon. She’s here to go to school part-time. Why? Her mother has just had cosmetic surgery. She wants to understand the biology of beauty. That’s as far as we get.
A few years later, I wrote Emily from L.A., sitting on the steps of my trailer watching the sheep. With what I knew I imagined that her family life was decadent, gaudy, and fake on the outside, ugly, depressing, and real on the inside.
I wrote Emily from L.A. to smear the makeup capitalism wears. I wrote it to mock the process of accumulating wealth. I wrote to disempower the rich by using their language against them. I wrote it to show the audience that rich folks are just as unpatriotic as everyone else. I wrote it to pock wholes in the American Dream so that listeners can hear the depression, disappointment, suffering, and exploitation echo inside of it. Ask Cornelius Vanderbilt. She and her family were rich bystanders in the drive by imagination of lower class boy who’d watched his family suffer under the oppression of racism and classism.
You say “well the emperor has been naked for a while.” Of course I know making fun of the rich is nothin’ new. So it goes. What’s might be coincidentally fresh about this song is that it is apt for these economic times. I wrote the song for you to listen to not consume.
As you listen, you might think I am jealous of her wealth. Part of me probably is…education don’t get you outa debt but does she know why her mom had cosmetic surgery?
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ask Knox: inspirations
This was a comment on a previous post which we thought warranted an Ask Knox response:
So after reading your blog post and visiting the website I was thinking about what you said about hoping the author never winds up reuniting with his muse. Do you think he would stop being able to write if he was happy and got what he longed for? Do you think the only good writing comes from unrequited love? And do you think your writing would be the same if you met the girl you’ve been searching for? Or do you think that no girl fills the bill because you are sabotaging yourself?
Continue reading ‘ask Knox: inspirations’
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Sounds at Night
Got this, interesting, anonymous post in the mail this week. Hardly a typical HBD post, but I enjoyed it enough to share with you, dear readers. Enjoy.
This is a transcript of an audio recording that my ex-girlfriend sent me to the night that she left to move to Texas for a new job. We dated for a year, and at the time of her sending this to me, had been broken up for a month and a half. Our breakup was quiet, she instigated, saying that with her leaving it was better to just let it go now, since I had never really wanted anything that was too serious. We parted with small, wet, smiles. I felt wounded, slightly the victim.
We didn’t speak much after that, although I thought about her all the time. It was so odd to listen to this recording that she made. I could tell she was speaking off the cuff, as her thoughts came to her. Her words had a slow, sad quality, and her voice sounds beautiful to me, deepened by the obviously late hour and her fitful sleep. When she says “maybe they’ll last.” her voice raises with the sweetest, hopeful note, which made me smile. She always was so optimistic, so joyful about life and it was me that often tried to tamp that down. I was wrong to let her go but it’s sort of obvious to me now how I pushed her away.
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Tracey, the interloper (part 5)
The rug business turned out to be a little more difficult than anticipated. My fixer was a ghost. The wholesaler I was supposed to sell to in Boston cancelled his order. I was stuck in Dar-el-Beida with 800 rugs and nothing to do with them. And it was going to be such a wonderful summer.
I was able to unload the rugs to a buyer from Canada, which helped with my losses, but I was still about 10 grand in the red. The only thing to do was go back to Spain, drink for a few weeks and come up with a new plan. Crossing the straits, I got to thinking about poor old Darryl. I talked with my sister about it from the train station, who cheered me up.
“It’s not your fault,” she said. “If you hadn’t come along to traumatize the girl, someone else would have.”
“I just don’t get why she couldn’t have waited for the guy to die. He clearly didn’t have much time left.”
“Yeah, but when you think about it, if you haven’t loved someone for years and you’re just playing the role, you may not want to wait around to watch them die.”
“I guess not.”
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Sophie, the conquistador
This is another story from Nolan Turner, who previously shared Rory, the titantic.
“This message is for Sophie, if this is still her phone number. This is Nolan giving you a call to see how you are doing. I am drunk and alone in a parking lot and more likely than not about to be arrested. I hope your life is turning out alright and that you have not worked yourself to death yet. Please give me a call sometime and maybe we can talk about who our favorite Bronte sister is and why. Mine is Charlotte.”
I left that message on Sophie’s cell phone about four months after Johnny left me for the singer of a now moderately famous hardcore band. When I dialed Sophie’s number all I was greeted with was what the sound of seal’s barking. I thought she had changed her number.
Sophie called me back the next day and we talked. Kept it casual. It was nice to hear her voice. I always felt like the two of us always had a knack for wandering into each other’s lives at the right time, and this was no exception: I was reeling from a string of failed courtships immediately following the Johnny debacle, and Sophie was wallowing away with some joyless Ph.D lit candidate asshole and seemed startlingly miserable and happy to hear from me. We connected again, and slowly eased back into talking every day. We eventually realized we never stopped caring about one another, and I became determined to break her away from this undeserving prick and win her back. It worked for a while.
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Tracey, the interloper (part 4)
All told, Daryl, Tracey’s ex-boyfriend, wasn’t such a bad guy. Sure, he had a crippling jealous streak in him. Sure, he stalked me all the way to Madrid, hid in my closet, attacked me, and subsequently dragged me by my ankles all the way to Chueca, where he offered 50 euros to any man who would bugger me in the neighborhood’s plaza (the offer immediately attracted a dozen takers, a few of whom were even willing to perform the job pro-bono). But after that he felt bad, apologized, and even took me out to get loaded. Besides, the guy had bone cancer and was supposed to die in six months.
“You have bone cancer?” I said, filling my glass from the meter-high cylinder of beer mounted to the side of our table. By this time, we were both feeling a little tipsy and relaxed in each other’s company.
“I have bone cancer.”
“And Tracey knew you had bone cancer?”
“Yeah.”
“And she broke up with you and left for Morocco?”
“Essentially.”
“And you two had been dating for how long?”
“Since we were juniors in high school, so just shy of 10 years.”
“God, what a cunt.”
Continue reading ‘Tracey, the interloper (part 4)’
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Dearest Knox,
I have had many relationships, both good and bad. I feel my romantic life is relatively healthy for a person my age and even though I’ve had my share of heartbreak, my regrets are few and good memories plenty. Last night – I fear I did something regrettable. For the first time ever, I completely lost my composure and became so enraged by a lie that I slapped my ex, in public, in front of his new girlfriend. Then I walked away. This was a reaction to a blatant lie and not the fact that he has a new girlfriend. I knew he had moved on, I just didn’t know it was before he had broken up with me. He blamed the breakup on the way I was acting regarding his sudden change in behavior – mystery solved. I can assure you he did something very wrong but I am still very disappointed in myself for being so out of control. Have you ever been slapped by a woman? Did you deserve it? How did you feel, other than slapped? I thought I would feel more closure than I do. Thoughts?
Continue reading ‘ask Knox: what did the five fingers say to the face?’
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Tracey, the interloper (part 3)
Though Tracey dropped the charges and I was released, the town I lived in was too small to live it down. My landlady said I had a week to vacate before she seized all of my belongings and sold them on ebay. I wasn’t late on rent or anything – I was just “rapist scum.” I figured this was as good a time as any get my rug business off the ground, so to speak. Before leaving town, I tacked a note on my door for Tracey, letting her know the addresses or the hostels I’d be staying at in Spain and then Morocco. It was a long shot, I knew. But I really wanted to hear from her again.
Getting out of dodge and getting drunk has always proven the best method for dealing with heartbreak, especially in foreign countries where few things remind you of your former self. Maybe I’ll never even come back, I thought. I’ll just wander the mountains, hocking rugs with nomadic Berbers. Crack, go native. Marry into a tribe, change my name, make babies in tents as sand storms rage outside. It’s funny, the things that go through your mind when you’re running away from your problems.
In Madrid, I spent my days wandering the city, stopping in for garlic fries smothered in mayonaise, and lots of Amstel. I smoked packs of cigarettes and tried to keep a diary. I haunted museums and nightclubs, dive bars and public parks. I tried making friends with strangers. I had a one-night stand with an Armenian tourist. I kept putting off Morocco.
It all helped to keep memories of the Tracey situation at bay, until I got her letter:
Continue reading ‘Tracey, the interloper (part 3)’
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Tracey, the interloper (part 2)
At the police station I called my attorney, who drove downtown to where I’d been drinking the night before. Apparently my Prius was still parked on Vanderbilt, where’d I’d left it.
“We might be able to reach out to the girl and explain to her that you drive the exact same make, model, year and color of car, parked half a block down and that you weren’t trying to rape her. That just might work. But you’re still gonna have to pay about $1500 in back tickets if you want them to take the boot off your hybrid.”Just when it seemed like my luck had changed, I go and pass out in the wrong car. I had a cracked rib, bruises just about everywhere and 25 stitches in my forehead. Not only that, but even if I could make bail, I was supposed to go to Africa the next week, but most likely wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country.
“Second time I’ve woken up to you today. Feels like a dream within a dream,” I said, standing up to face her through the bars.
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Tracey, the interloper (Part I)
I had been parked on Vanderbilt Avenue and asleep in the backseat when she broke into my car and sped off down the road. She must have had no idea I was there, for when she caught a glimpse of me in the rearview mirror she did a quick double take and her eyeballs dilated. Then she began screaming at the top of her lungs.
“Who the fuck are you? And what the fuck are you doing in my Prius?” I slurred, half-drunk and slightly amused by the terrified and utterly attractive stranger driving my hybrid. I looked down at my chest and noticed that there was a rainbow flower lei around my neck. Out the passenger side window it appeared that we were speeding uncontrollably along a residential stretch of block near campus. In my stupor I was both confused and giddy, and began laughing uncontrollably. 
I was still laughing and she was still screaming when she lost control of the steering wheel. The Prius suddenly veered left, hopping a curb and tearing through a well-kept lawn. We unearthed a flowerbed before eventually crashing into an oak tree.
I must have hit my face against the roof of the car because I was now covered in blood, the site of which only made me laugh harder. She was thrashing about wildly in the front seat looking for a way out. Her berserk movements reminded me of a badger that I had once trapped in a tiny cage, the thought of which was also quite hilarious to me.
“Badger! Woodland creature!” I croaked. “I demand you quell your kerfuffle at once and state to me your coarse intentions.”
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