Letters to a Broken Heart | Vol. 1
"We complete relationships instead of failing at them."
“Letters to a Broken Heart” is a collaborative writing project between Sophia Hembeck & Lachrista Greco.
After seeing an Instagram story about Lachrista’s breakup Sophia took a screenshot of her words not knowing that a few days later she would break up with her partner as well. The duo started writing letters to each other about their heartbreak. Each Sunday for the month of September, Sophia will be posting her letters to Lachrista’s newsletter, and Lachrista will be posting hers on Sophia’s newsletter.
If you want to follow our journey make sure you are subscribed to both of us.
Read Lachrista’s response, the second letter here.
Lachrista Greco, 24th June 2022:
“Ended my relationship tonight with someone I’m totally in love with because he’s unable to be emotionally in it anymore for a lot of reasons & kept pushing me away. Life goes on, I guess. I’m sad but ok. First time ever that I have broken up with someone. And I really didn’t want to…”
Sophia Hembeck, 30th June 2022:
“this is me now. heartbroken. newly single. no regrets.”
Dear Lachrista,
I thought I’d feel better by now. It’s been six weeks since I broke up with my partner and yet almost not a single day without me crying. I’m writing this while on a bus and Karen O is singing “Wait they don’t love you like I love you” in my ears. It still hits.
I thought that by now I’d be dancing on that relationships grave (sorry for the macabre metaphor) but broken hearts are so dramatic and hard to confine: that by now I thought I’d be rising out of the ashes how Sylvia Plath put it to “eat men like air.” But I’m just a sad blob. Imagine the blobfish here. A sad blob on a bus to see a show, because that is also part of it, that life and the show must go on.
Maybe that is the saddest part of recovery. Where enough time has passed that people sort of forget your heart is still broken and where one is trying desperately to hide it. Everyone has their own empathy timeline for other people’s pain and I can hear it ticking.
However, one’s own empathy timeline shall never end. This is what I’m holding close these days. As much as the fact that there’s a good reason it is over.
The other day I got a job rejection which unlike usual rejection emails made me absolutely happy.
It said: “You are hugely talented and I feel you deserve more than what I can offer you.” Which is something people should say more often to other people when they can’t offer them what they deserve instead of stringing them along and taking up space.
But one also has to try to know. To get there. To the end.
This is how I would like to see it. That we complete relationships instead of failing at them. That some are shorter than others. That we can’t know until we know.
When I saw on your Instagram story back in late June that you had broken up with someone you were still in love with, who just wasn’t able to be emotionally in the relationship any longer, that it wasn’t a decision against them but for you, I took a screenshot, not knowing why, well I know now, but three days later, I was faced with the same decision.
Which in retrospect didn’t really feel like a decision at all. It felt more like being put on a boat and pushed out to weather the storms alone in the hope of finding a calmer sea.
And I’m still out there. Waves rocking, rowing my path. But I know I’m not alone in this. I know you are out there just as so many others right now, trying to find their way across.
If you look up, you can see me waving.
XX
Sophia
Sophia Hembeck is a writer and visual artist based in Edinburgh. She is the author of the hybrid memoir/essay collection “Things I Have Noticed” and is writing the weekly Muse Letter on Substack.
“Letters to a Broken Heart” is a collaborative writing project between Sophia Hembeck & Lachrista Greco. If you want to follow our journey of healing from heartbreak, make sure you are subscribed to both of us, as we will be publishing a letter each Sunday for the next weeks to come.
Read Lachrista’s response, the second letter here.