A Young Poet’s Guide to Surviving a Broken Heart

Two weeks after it happens, slip on a bright-colored T-shirt, exchange your thick glasses for contact lenses, and when people ask how you’re doing, reply, “I have to admit it was pretty tough at first, but things have started to really improve these past few days.” Don’t say that you weren’t crushed in the least because you saw it coming from the start—no one will buy it. Head to the library first thing Monday morning. Not on the weekend. They’ll think you have no life. Return your favorite books of confessional poetry; you won’t need them anymore. Borrow history books—on Dutch colonization, on world history for kids. And when the librarian asks, tell them you’re writing a novel that takes place over a period of three hundred years. Tell them one of your characters is an accountant who experiences the stock market crash of 1929. Tell them that you yourself are a work in progress, ever progressing, ever progressing.

This story previously appeared as “A Heartbreak Survival Kit for Young Poets” translated by Shaffira Gayatri in The Near and the Far, Volume 2, edited by David Carlin and Francesca Rendle-Short, and published by Scribe in 2019.