How to fall out of love:

     Finding love is hard, but falling in love is as easy as growing hair.  The way someone leaps into bed after a long day can make you fall in love, or the way they read a fortune cookie or even the way they might dance a little while cracking an egg over an eager skillet.  I once fell in love with a guy simply because he owned the movie Muppet Treasure Island.   Point is, it takes nothing to fall in love and everything to fall out of it, because when you fall out of it, those laughs, sneezes or eggs all of the sudden steam out of you like the air in a carefully baked but poorly timed souffle.
     I have fallen deeply out of love many times.  Last time I was faced with falling out of love, I got on a train across the country.  The entire city of Chicago, every alley way, every sun kissed window of every building was a dance before the crack of an egg and I couldn't stay.  For that reason and for a long time, I thought it was weakness that lead me to California, but I think more than anything it was just what I knew I had to do.  People move across the world all the time to be with the person they love, why is it weak to move across the world to fall out of love?  I have not talked to Kevin since I left Chicago, it's been almost 5 months, and what the utter lack of communication has provided me with is closure.
     Everyone always wants closure, they will bitch about it for years after a break up, "we just never got closure ya know?"  Closure means something different to everyone but always boils down to the need to mutually forgive.  What I don't think most people understand is that closure isn't something that can ever be mutually given; it is something only conceivable in a singular mind and is only consummated and solidified by each party individually.   I have tried repeatedly to gain closure with the same people for years, but it wasn't in their admittance of guilt or regret that I found closure, it was in the silence.  It was on a beach in California, alone that I let it go.
     That's what closure really is, letting it go.  It is not focusing on the reasons given for the break up, or thinking about what you could have done differently or how could have been more gentle; because it doesn't matter.   Which is my first rule of falling out of love, realizing it doesn't matter.   It doesn't matter anymore that I lied about everything, or that I was cheated on at some point or that I once found a stack of black tranny truckers porn in one of my ex's laundry hamper.  Replaying those things or the reasons that lead up to your now single self is pointless because it enables you to harboring sadness.  It doesn't matter.
     My second rule, and might be the most important rule is; delete and save.  Delete your ex from your phone, from your facebook, delete the cute emails and texts, delete any and all lines of being reached or reaching out.  Communicating with an ex is like calling an automated customer service representative for a vacuum cleaner bag that hasn't been manufactured in 20 years; all your going to hear is a voice that says nothing you need to hear.   Save.  Save the love letters.  Someday you will want them.
     The third rule to falling out of love is; don't replace.  Love is not like a broken i-pod, which has millions of identical replica's just waiting to be purchased to replace the one that no longer works.  It is easy to replace an i-pod and it can be easy to replace a lover; but where replacing an i-pod is simply practical, replacing a lover is not.  Giving your heart time to mend and crack and then mend again is essential for growth.  By jumping into a new relationship you destroy that time and I promise you, you will not grow.  You will just repeat. 
     My fourth and final rule for falling out of love is; look pretty.  Even if you look like a wet mop, go buy yourself a beautiful piece of jewelry or a pair of jeans that make you feel sexy.  Give people a reason to compliment you, even if it's superficial. Confidence will singlehandedly guide you out of love with your ex and in love with yourself, and feeling outwardly beautiful is the first step in doing that.  After gaining your superficial confidence, it is time to look inside yourself, meditate, be silent and let it go.  Let the hurt go, but don't forget to not forget.  It is more healthy to remember your loves and let the hurt go than it is to try and forget them and the lessons they forced you to learn.

     I occasionally still think about Muppet Treasure Island.  And I smile, every time.
  

The moon sure has taken a pounding said the pesimest.

          I have spent a good portion of my life telling self loathers that they are wonderful people.  I thought my words would help them. I didn't understand that some people hate themselves because they are not wonderful people; that at their core they know they are ugly.  Then there are self loathers who know they are beautiful at their core but lack the inner voice to fight off other people's cruelty.  I was, for a long time the second type.
           What I now understand it that loving yourself is hard, taking the time to see your faults or the ugliness that is buried beneath a kind and submissive demeanor is excruciating, and forgiving them is blinding.  People have asked me why California has been hard, how I can be so heavy in the lightest city in the world.  What I do not tell these people, my family, friends or old loves; is that it has been hard because it was in California that I began to take the time to love myself, and for some reason it has been the most painful process I have ever endured.  Now that the pain of it is clearing, I cannot bare to tell someone who hates themselves to not. Or to tell them it will get better, if they themselves believe that it will not.
           I cannot take it upon myself to heal anyone's heart or to believe I even posses that power; for it is the very notion of that power that has destroyed me time and time again and is another thing I spent a large portion of my life doing.  Believing I had the power to heal another person's suffering by giving them my heart, giving them every molecule of love I had in hopes that it would make them right.  Right for me, right for themselves, or just right enough to wake up.  I have no power. Even if I did, I can't.  I can't because self love is strong, it is the invisible atmosphere of our body, keeping our oxygen circulating, our gravity centered, and the UV rays of sadness out.  I can't because while I am astounded at it's ability and of it's strength, I know that negative people can pass through my atmosphere if I do not protect it.  That if I let certain people in they will gain enough momentum and obliterate the new and fragile foundation of my self love.

          The difference between the frailty of self love and the momentum of self loathing is the unseen layer of which they both pass through, the atmosphere that pulls in neggitivity and burns it up before it reaches the earth of your soul vs. the astroid of hate that is to big to disentigrate; leaving in its wake a crater and a shock wave of fire.