A Little Advice

I don’t recommend nursing a broken heart while eating a greasy calzone in a mall cafeteria. Especially my local mall, where you’re almost always bound to be one of two people in the entire cafeteria. The other person is the janitor, whose lack of ass and boatload of keys means his pants are hanging by a belt and a prayer. He stands in place wiping a rag over the same clean table with the same dead eyes in a perpetual frozen state since the nineteen nineties. He’s like the mosquito stuck in a sad sepia resin of capitalism’s underbelly. At least then, when you were in high school, the mall wasn’t an abandoned soul suck. At least then, you didn’t eat alone in the cafeteria.

Now, you’re a forty something stuck in the same frozen time glitch sitting at the same table, feeling perverse by sinking your fingers into a meaty moist calzone and pulling out the slimy red and green peppers you hate. Like the janitor, you may not have ever left this table—at least not in spirit, and the only thing that’s changed in the last two decades is your waistline and hair color. The same Orwellian soft rock soundtrack from two decades ago lulls you into calm resignation while something in your gut simultaneously screams to be released. Orange grease drips from the corners of your mouth making you look like a sad clown. Each time you slip a limp pepper from the calzone, you think to yourself: I deserve this. I deserve this pepper. 

No, I don’t recommend your local mall for the self pity party.

(Or laundromats. Those are also places you feel particularly depressed and pissed at the world.)

And in the only department store that hasn’t gone under to Amazon, there’s bound to be one fluorescent light in the dressing room that flickers so hard you’re at risk of a seizure even if you don’t have epilepsy.

Lady A (formerly Lady Antebellum) sings the pop country song of your people over the store’s sound system : 

“… It's a quarter after one

I'm a little drunk and I need you now

Said I wouldn't call, but I lost all control

And I need you now”

Simultaneously your mind plays its own mantra on loop: depression lies…don’t text your ex…depression lies…don’t text your ex…

And you know you must be getting old because the clothes in JC Penney’s are suddenly looking cute. Last time you were here you cried in the dressing room at the sight of your thick thighs bulging out of cream colored spanks you were trying on to wear under your prom dress. It’s hard to remember that girl—the smart pubescent one with a pretty face and painful nipples; the girl trying to navigate menstruation, melancholy, and love; the girl who liked alternative music and had Plath’s The Bell Jar dog-eared in her leather backpack. 

You don’t recognize yourself on the outside anymore. You’re probably standing in the same dressing room as you did decades ago, surrounded by three walls of funhouse mirrors. But the inner reflection hasn’t changed. Your hormones are still going haywire (except now it’s perimenopause); you’re still on antidepressants; and you still have a crippling fear of abandonment. 

And you still find yourself accidentally browsing in the petite section, running your hands over adorable outfits and wondering why the little blond with the Patagonia jacket is giving you concerned glances, only to realize your mistake and beeline it to your homeland where busty bald mannequins call you back with open stiff arms?—the same Amazonian mannequins whom you hip check (and apologize) because there’s not enough room for two plus sized ladies here. (Why do they put petite next to plus size? Can’t there be a buffer? A neutral zone? A gradient? Why must these two countries share a border?)

“I'm all alone and I need you now

Said I wouldn't call, but I lost all control

And I need you now”

Nope. The mall is one maladaptive coping mechanism you should really ditch. Drop that paisley polyester blouse and book it outa there; do your girl a favor and tackle that Renaissance mannequin on your way; bust an old rugby move and free that queen;  pull that fire alarm; punch a pack of pantyhose; push over the table of cropped tops and daisy dukes; hip check a rack of retinol wrinkle reducing blah blah blah; run as fast as your now-out-of-style skinny jeans will let you; and don’t get caught at the exit where the revolving door will dump you back into the hellish mental time warp of a trap that is your childhood trauma and insecure attachment personality type. 

No, let the calzone-causing heartburn motivate you.

Let your heart burn.

Burn rubber in the parking lot while Ms. Mannequin hangs from your passenger window. Back your car into Patagonia Girl’s Wrangler like Kathy Bates, Fried Green Tomatoes style. Peel outa there like Thelma and Louise; peel off that idea that you aren’t good enough.

The only way to heal is to let that burn in your heart burn itself out.

And if you could say something to that sullen girl you left in the dressing room, that 90’s child who kept a diary and dreamed of being an author, you might tell her: Learn not to measure your success in the number of miles you made it from your hometown, but by the number of times you look in the mirror and soften your gaze.

And this: Keep writing.

And this: Seriously though, don't text your ex.

Despite aging, existential angst, and a touch of anger, your eyes still shine. You remain tender and maybe even the teeny tiniest bit hopeful about love. Because you know something that girl doesn’t yet trust: 

You’re going to be okay.

Heartbreak, though it may feel like a death sentence, is just fuel for the fire inside you, accelerant to keep you driving toward your truth. Stay the course.

And stay away from the mall.