Cliché

Dear Diary,

Wish me luck. I submitted some of my writing to a literary contest. If I win not only will I get published, but I’ll also get to attend a writers retreat for free! That’s six weeks in Iceland to just write and...be.

I submitted a story about my breakup with Johnny. So now in addition to being a total cliché—a twenty something in New York to become a writer—I’m now a total total cliché because I write about heartbreak. There’s this old movie...I don’t remember what it’s called, but Olivia Munn’s character says “That’s the thing about heartbreak. To you the world is ending and to everyone else it’s just...” well, you get the idea. There’s another cliché I heard...well, maybe this is more of an idiom...death by one thousand cuts.

That’s the thing about Johnny. He didn’t break my heart all at once. He could never be up front with me and just say: Look, you’re not who I want. He could never let me go, he could never be strong enough. I’m just glad one of us decided to be responsible (cough, me, cough) or else we’d still be in that same cycle. One week you love me, the next week you can’t remember my name.

I’m better off. I know that so I’ll just keep telling myself until I believe it. The trip to Japan helped. It was like a detox...now I can stop passing restaurants and book stores and associating them with him. Eventually, I’ll be able to walk around the entire city, and I won’t think of him at all. But now that I do think of it—it was so rude of him to waste my time like that. If you don’t really like me, get lost. It’s that simple. Grow up or get left back...in the immortal words of Nikka Dragon “If you’re not really about it, don’t be about it”. He couldn’t even commit to being trash.

To make matters worse, he doesn’t like what I write. He said it was “cute”...how insulting.