Generational Heartbreak
By Lily Marsland
My grandma once told me that when she was seventeen, she fell deeply in love with a man named Sandy. As she described him there was still a sense of longing in her voice, sixty-one years down the line. She laughed an exasperated laugh as she spoke, as if it was silly that she ever felt that way. Yet, I noticed the lines around her mouth disappear ever so slightly and, as a haze of pinkish blush forced its way to the surface of her cheeks, my slightly pretentious, highly strung, beige-carpeted grandmother was instantaneously a seventeen-year-old girl, who was inevitably and extensively in love. I listened as she spoke, a wide-eyed, willing student, taking note of each word, clinging on so as to not let the story fade with her. She told me that Sandy’s family came from a well-off background. Old money. Her parents owned a bakery, which I could recall from stories my dad would tell me, rotting his teeth on Chelsea buns and toffees. At eighteen, they became engaged. She rolled her eyes and her tone turned nonchalant, as if this meant nothing to her now. She said that Sandy’s parents disapproved. Her gaze went still. ‘They flew him to Canada’.
My grandma waited weeks to hear from him, a painful and tender longing, which I can relate to all too well. She told me that she can still remember the exact moment the letter came through the door. The echoing of the postbox slamming against the wood and the snare-like sound of the paper brushing the floor. In the letter, Sandy had written that he had met someone else. Her name was Bonnie. And they were engaged. My grandma was destroyed. Sat sobbing at the kitchen table as if someone had died.
Three days ago, I was broken up with. My heart mutilated and destroyed at the speed of a sentence. He sat on my bed as I sobbed black, blotchy mascara into his shirt. Eighteen years of age, completely and utterly broken by a boy. He was my Sandy. He kissed my forehead and the door slammed and echoed around the hallway as he left, piercing into me like a wave of aloneness. I am terrified of still remembering that sound when I am seventy-eight.
Everyone overlooks you when you’re young. It’s not a divorce, no, and it might not have even been ‘real love’, whatever that means. But despite being further away from my grandma than I have been before, in a new city, with people I do not know, I feel more connected to her than ever. Because whether it's now or sixty years ago, we are both just eighteen-year-old girls, grieving for our Sandys.