Dear Miss Misery,

I feel you girl! Let me tell you about a particularly nasty heartbreak of mine: I'll call her Whitney.

Whitney and I had a torrid affair that only lasted one month, after which she promptly moved to Vermont, leaving me longing and lonely in her wake.

There's the type of loss that feels like an egg rotting inside your chest—a slow and deliberate pain that spreads the longer it's left unchecked. Then there's the one where a claw reaches inside you and tears something out, leaving you to fill the space with whatever you can just to get by. The second type was my style after Whitney.

I wrote love poetry, hate poetry and desperate missives I knew I'd never send her. I quit my job and ate peanut butter for weeks without leaving my apartment. I never slept for longer than an hour without waking up in a panic. I launched myself into a series of short-lived relationships, all of which were thinly-veiled substitutes for Whitney. Each woman I dated had at least one of Whitney's traits; long brown hair, or lots of tattoos or a shy demeanor. At least a few of them even had Whitney's lisp. It was trite and obvious. I was pathetic.

You know what got me through it? Talking about her to my friends. I don't know if that's lame or not, but it worked. At first it took me hours to tell someone the whole story. But after telling it a few thousand times, I realized the story had kept getting shorter and shorter, until it ended up only being one sentence long: "Whitney and I had a torrid affair that only lasted one month, after which she promptly moved to Vermont, leaving me longing and lonely in her wake." Easy enough! The rest of the story is pretty simple: I got over it eventually. Of course that's not the entire story, but some sort of healing magic happened when I turned that hurtful moment into a type of simple fiction. I still think about her all the time, but now she's only a part of my heart—not the entire organ itself.