Breakups are hard. “molly breakup doc” can help.

I thought I was alone in my heartache. Then I started reading.

This morning I received a text with a link to a poem called Divorce. “Is this already in the doc?” my friend Emma wanted to know. I turned on my computer, navigated to Google Drive, and opened the file called “molly breakup doc.” “Yep,” I texted back. “Is everything okay?”

My girlfriend of nine years left me in the fall of 2020. By the spring of 2022, I was still asking my therapist what was normal. I know there is no normal, per se, but sometimes you have to ask anyway. Was it normal, for example, that I was still dreaming of her, standing in a warehouse bathroom or floating in a big green pool? Was it normal that, when I hit a snag while combing my hair, I started crying, because she’d always brushed out the knots for me? And, in retrospect, was that normal — that she’d been brushing my hair in the first place?

My therapist said, “I think, when someone has experienced a very significant loss — ”

“Loss!” I interrupted. “That’s what’s happening. I have experienced a very significant loss.” I was shocked. I couldn’t believe it. My abnormality had a name. It was a very common word.

My friend Shona said when her ex left her, she burst into tears in front of a grocery clerk who’d asked how her day was going. She cried so hard that the man offered her a chair. In a parking lot, a year later, another friend, Eva, said, “After my divorce, I felt like I had a PhD in my husband and nothing to use it for.” Over tea in her kitchen, Dasha told me how once, after a really bad one, she lived for two long years without touching anyone, except for little brushes on the subway. On a winter afternoon at the dog run, Munira turned from the big gray sky and declared: “The queer divorcée is the most interesting person in any room.” But I didn’t want to be interesting, I wanted to go back in time.

My friends helped, of course they did, but my friends were not enough. I needed strangers, the private fears and ugly thoughts of people who did not know or love me. Luckily, I was a black hole now. I exerted a gravitational pull. My magnetism attracted breakup stories. Poems, songs, and novels all came to me, of their own accord. They gathered at my center (this is called accretion) until, one night in December, lying in bed, I decided to collate them. I created a Google Doc, titled it “molly breakup doc,” then copied and pasted a few links to poems.

All winter and all spring, I added to the document, squirling away links with ferocity. I was particularly attracted to anything made by now-older people who, whether they said it directly or not, had clearly thought they were going to die…and then did not die.

The other thing I wanted, despite knowing it was impossible, was a timeline. I filled the document with temporal guideposts — poems, songs, and stories that mentioned specific amounts of time elapsing. One of the Indigo Girls had still been asking when her ex was gonna come home two years after their separation. Kaia Wilson was still sleeping in her ex’s t-shirt four years later. It took Maggie Nelson three years to no longer be counting the days.

✦

Then, someone broke up with my friend Nicole. In a fit of solidarity, I sent the document to her. Now, it had an audience. More people broke up. Friends of friends, former coworkers, neighbors. Having a document ready to send is a wonderful experiment if you want to investigate how frequently people are breaking up. Because the answer is constantly. There is an epidemic of separation in this world. I can say now that this is not a bad thing. I wanted my document to comfort other people, but I also wanted other people to tell me what my document said. Not the individual stories, poems, or songs, but the document as a whole, taken as composite. What was happening to me? I added another link, moved a different one around — did that change anything?

When Nicole received the doc, she was grateful, but said she had to stop reading halfway through, because she wasn’t prepared for how dark one of the poems would be. I understood. Sometimes you want hope and sometimes you simply want to know that others, too, have felt this hopeless. I added categories to the document, starting with “Poems for when you want to know that other people have also felt this bad, want to wallow, etc.” and “Poems for when you want to be convinced you will one day feel better, that it was all worth it, that you and other human beings are capable of grace, etc.” I divided the document by genre, in case people were specifically in the mood for a song or a novel or a short essay.

I’d assumed compiling my document was a new impulse — one born from loss — but, while writing this, I remembered something: in our early days together, I made a little book of poems for my ex. I’d printed them on silver craft store paper. I cannot remember what I included in the book, only how vital it felt to give it to her. I’d forgotten how, years later, when everything between us was coming apart, I found her in our living room, with the book between her hands, searching, it seemed, for a record.

Here’s the document. It has a beginning and an end. It has many logics. I’ve stopped adding to it. I’m giving it to you.

PS – There’s a lot in the doc, so just in case you’re feeling heartbroken and in a hurry, here are Molly’s top three entries:

• A Myth of Devotion – “Hades on Persephone, for when your breakup is feeling of mythological proportions.”

• I’ve Listened to this Breakup Song a Million Times – “An essay about a song, so it’s a two-for-one. I think about the last line all the time.”

• The Summer of Dead Birds – “A novel-in-verse featuring The Big Three: death, divorce, and going on a road trip with your dog.”

The doc got us all meta and thinking about the process of doc-making itself. Some of us are prone to keeping notebooks, Joan Didion-style (maybe because we “are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss” — thanks, Joan). Others of us prefer to keep Commonplace Books, which Charley Locke suggests are “like a diary without the risk of annoying yourself.”

Not to get (more) dorky, but the official term for “doc-making” is “archiving,” and we’d be remiss not to point out that digital archiving can be an important form of resistance, a way of preserving cultural records amidst censorship (stay strong, librarians, we love ya!). You can make your own Google Doc of the most “this can’t be real” headlines, or opt to start with something slightly less heavy. Have an eye for strange beauty products (and their equally strange customer reviews)? Go for it, you Snail Mucin Scholar, you! Or maybe your friends always ask you for restaurant recs, and your life would be easier if you kept them all in one place. If you’re inspired to build a doc of your own (or already have one going), share it with us in the comments!

Hope your Sunday is more WOW than woe.