Editor's Note: Through the Looking Glass is The Mirror's newest feature. We welcome submissions from all members of the community both past and present who wish to write about defining experiences, moments or relationships during their time at Dartmouth. Please submit articles of about 1,000 words to the.dartmouth@dartmouth.edu.
I can't sleep. I haven't slept in a long time. The insomnia started after the end of my relationship a few months back. When I told my friend, she said, "Oh, you miss the body in your bed." That's the way she phrased his entire being: the Body. Well, yes. I do miss the Body. But it's more complicated than that.
Over the past few tired months, I've learned how hard a breakup can be. It's especially hard in a school as small as this one. I see him around most days. I see his new girlfriend most hours. And each time, I have the overwhelming urge to throw up. I wonder where does the need to vomit fall in the grief cycle?
A few weeks ago, I was in a frat, and I was very drunk. Sometime after 2 a.m., the Body and the new girlfriend walked in, and I screamed a few profanities in their general direction because it's important to be as classy as possible in these situations. Then I started crying. Then I left. I woke up the next morning embarrassed and confused and holding a pillow like it was the most precious thing in the world.
The next day, my friend told me about something called the Boyfriend Pillow. Basically, it's a pillow with an arm made specifically for sad, lonely women. We joked about buying it together like a timeshare. I need a new Body, after all. When I told one of my more practical friends about the "potential new Body," she said, "But Carol, what happens when you bring a boy home? Won't you be embarrassed?"
I thought about it, and I wanted to say yes. But the idea of bringing a boy home seemed laughably far-fetched.
When I share these feelings with my friends the sense that I've already had my most meaningful Dartmouth relationship they say I'm giving my ex "too much power." That could be true. But the sadder truth is that the culture of this school is one of hook-ups, not of relationships. I was in a relationship for a year and a half, and I'm extremely sad and embarrassed to say that I know very little about the man I claimed to love. I took the hook-up culture of this school and somehow grew a relationship from its ruins. A hook-up relationship. It's no surprise, then, that it failed. I could blame it on youth, I could blame it on Dartmouth, I could blame it on myself.
It's complicated, as these things often are.
After the end of my relationship, I went through all the appropriate motions: I gained weight, I lost weight, I broke down in front of a professor and I told my friends that I was "glad" my last relationship failed so miserably.
In the hours when I'm awake during the night, however, everything feels like a dream. My entire Dartmouth experience has been yet another show I watch passively on Hulu, knowing it'll just be canceled next season, anyway. And during these nighthours, I realize that I've been too scared to really understand my own emotions that my unhappiness isn't really mine. It feels foreign, as if my emotions are these prerequisites I have to get through before I graduate from college. First love? Check. Loss of virginity? Check. Insurmountable heartbreak and the resulting insomnia? Check after check.
I realize I've treated my time at Dartmouth in the same way, like it's something I started only so I could finish and get to my real life. Like the past (almost) four years have been something fake. I regret that. I didn't take myself very seriously. I knew the Body would break my heart, just like I knew that the impending heartbreak was in reality more self-inflicted than it was from him. I caused myself this pain because what doesn't kill us makes us stronger, and I wanted my future self to be as strong as possible.
After writing this, I feel I have to qualify some of what I said. After a breakup, people tend to diminish their feelings for the other person. In truth, I did really love him. But it doesn't matter anymore. We've both changed. Now, he's just the College Body. These are just my college years. These are the ramblings of my college self whose purpose, I decided long ago, was only to support my future self this person I may or may not ever become. It's hollow, this self-actualization I've always hoped for. I wonder if there's a pillow for that, too.
I'm still thinking about buying the Boyfriend Pillow. But what's holding me back isn't the potential of a new lover, like my friend suggested. I've grown so accustomed to this loneliness that I might be lonely without it. It's tangible enough that I think it is growing arms all on its own. I'll probably just save my $29.95 and use it for a Netflix subscription. I don't sleep, anyway.
