Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.

It’s funny the things the mind does to cope with a breakup.

The first thing my mind wants to do is make it all better—make it go away. Sometimes this involves denial—oh! denial is my favorite—and sometimes I will involve myself in something constructive. Clean the house, bleach the toilet, shampoo the rugs, paint a room, or bury myself up to the eyeballs in work. Everybody has their method.

Psychiatrists call these methods coping mechanisms, and the theory goes, the more effective your coping mechanisms are, the better you are at handling tragedy when it eventually befalls you. Because, the one fact about life is: nobody gets out of it without having bad things happen to them; even if you’re a hermit living on a mountain in the middle of nowhere, no matter how much you protect yourself from it, something bad will happen to you. How you handle it could ultimately change who you are. Will it be a triumph or become an affliction?

Yesterday, I stopped functioning. I caved in to my despondency. I went home, laid under a down comforter on the most comfortable sofa ever created by human hands, took far too many white wonders to stave off the aching in my belly, ate a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and watched a breakup movie marathon, getting up only to go to the bathroom and let the dog out. I needed to make the world stop for a while; moreover, I needed to figure a way out of this.

Then M called at 4:00. I needed to stop by his house to pick up wardrobe items that I had left behind from our last show. I got dressed and drove over to his house (which is only a couple of blocks from mine), and wondered how uncomfortable this would be. It wasn’t. Denial is something M is really, really good at. He acted as if nothing was wrong and the conversation of the night before had never happened. As we sifted through the laundered wardrobe items to pick out things that were personally mine, we chatted about various unrelated things: the weather, raking leaves, etc. Then, “You know,” M began, “I was thinking, with all these costumes left over, maybe we can rent them out to other companies. I mean, why not? We have tons of them, and we could make a lot of money with that. We could have a cash cow on our hands. What do you think?”

I laughed a little inside at the paradoxical use of the word “we”. I thought to myself, What ‘we’? Hadn’t we sufficiently established there is no ‘we’ just 24 hours ago? Yet… my mind, fatigued from despair and a daylong marathon of breakup movies, desperately wanted to go back to that safe “we” place, and found comfort in it. I didn’t want to argue. I went along with the gag even though I know that I can’t go on with our business partnership under the current setup. The moment of lightness eased the burden of my defeat if only for a moment—and my mind grasped at it eagerly with both hands.

I went home, and got off the sofa long enough to eat a proper meal. I moved on to the last movie in my marathon and wondered, “What’s the point of all this? Why have boyfriends? Why have friends? As happy as you are one day is how miserable you will be the next. You will fight. You will argue. You will break up.” I watched the couple in the movie kiss and thought, “Oh sure, you’re happy now, but he’s going to break your heart soon and make you wish you were dead! You wait and see!”

I thought about how much hope I used to have when I was younger, even in the midst of heartbreak. I remember scrubbing the floors of my old apartment after I’d broken up with some guy. I’d put on music and was singing at the top of my lungs while simultaneously sobbing and scrubbing the floor with bleach. Yet, in none of that did I ever really believe I’d be alone forever. I thought, just like the movies, someone will find me and unfreeze my heart. Right?

In modern movie storytelling, the divorcing couple doesn’t always kiss and make up at the end. Two movies I watched yesterday had radically different endings: “The Story Of Us” ended unrealistically, with the uptight Michelle Pfeiffer character protesting the divorce from irresponsible Bruce Willis through an explosion of tears swearing she can “loosen up” and they can work it out. He agrees. They happily ride off into the sunset together holding hands. However, in “The Break Up”, uptight Jennifer Aniston more realistically rebuffs Vince Vaughn’s climactic confession of love, and promises of change, by saying “I’m sorry, but I just don’t feel that way anymore; it’s too late.”

Yet, now, I do think I’ll be alone forever. Instead of dramatically scrubbing my floors with bleach and singing sad songs, I’m sucking down pills and ice cream and hiding under a down comforter watching bad movies and wondering how long it would take people to find my dead body if my heart just broke in two right now. It’s the despondency that gets me, not the depression itself.

I didn’t even feel like going to bed, wondering what worth sleep was when you’d just wake up a few hours later still feeling miserable. I couldn’t help but ask myself out loud, “How long do you think you can keep this up? Are you just going to take pills and sleep on the sofa for the rest of your life? Hiding is not a good coping mechanism, and you know it!”

I answered myself out loud, “Just for today. I just need to do it today. Tomorrow, I promise, I will deal.”

This morning when I woke up, it was as I expected; life still sucked and I was still alone and confused. The word “we” has become a terrorist in my life. Then, a new thought occurred to me. If I make an effort to fill my time with new things that do not involve anything related to “we”, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Okay, so, maybe I won’t have this partnership business and ever be a “we” with me and M. Maybe I will never get married and become a legal “we”. Maybe nobody will ever love me. Maybe I’ll never find my soul mate (if such a thing even exists). I have to do my time on this earth anyway. I’m stuck. Surely there are other things I can do to pass the time.

What if I tried to do things that benefited me alone in my aloneness? What if I took a cooking class? I’ve always wanted to do that, and surely some college somewhere around here has a cooking class that’s cheap. What if I took a home repair class at the local Home Depot? That would be useful if nothing else. I could even volunteer for a few hours at the local animal shelter to groom and train dogs. Along those lines, I could adopt a new puppy to be a companion for my current dog. Nothing will distract you from life’s problems faster than housetraining a new puppy!

The best way for me to handle this breakup is to find something else to do. Maybe I’ll write a book about it!