Yin Yang Love Song

Chapter 25 Vin

Chapter 25

VIN

T he heart-shaped seats are comfier than they look. I’m sitting between Daisy and a guest named Ruth, who I met the first time I was in this circle. I’m sitting directly across from Chryssy, who’s holding a sleepy Goji in her lap. Three other guests occupy chairs. The only thing we have in common is our awkwardness. And apparently heartbreak.

Just when I was starting to appreciate the quiet, it became quieter than it’s ever been between me and Chryssy. That kind of silence I can’t stand. We made it back to the inn a few days ago, but the only time I’ve seen Chryssy was when she left to go to Seattle with her aunties for an appointment. Anytime I was frustrated as a kid, I’d escape into music. So that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.

That is, until Leo told me to meet him here this morning. Of course, I showed but he never did, and I didn’t expect to see Chryssy here.

I tap my foot on the grass, jiggling my leg as if it could pound a tunnel through the ground for me to escape through, even though no one’s forcing me to be here.

“Thank you for joining us today in the Heartbreak Circle,” Daisy says in a calming tone. “This is a safe space. You don’t have to talk, and you can share as much or as little as you’d like.”

I exhale slowly, cursing under my breath. I remind myself that I can walk away just as easily as I did last time.

Daisy crosses her hands in her lap. “Studies show that pain from heartbreak appears in the brain the same way as pain from a physical injury. In the same way that everybody’s heartbreak is unique to them, the healing process is, too. For some, talking helps. Who’d like to share? Our hearts are open.”

A guest named Penny is the first to speak. “I think for me, it’s that I don’t know where to put my sadness. When my fiancé left me the night before our wedding, it was like he just stabbed a knife right here,” she says, pointing to the spot below her heart. “The hurt, the humiliation… it all lingers. I don’t know that it’ll ever go away until I know why. Why did he leave?”

“A little closure would be nice,” Ruth says. “There are already so many unknowns in the world. Why must the end of relationships be, too?”

“Thank you,” Penny says, wiping her eyes. “What about for you? Did you get closure?”

Ruth purses her lips. “No, but I gave it. After my diagnosis, things changed in my relationship. I needed a radical shift in my life, and I wanted to do it with my girlfriend. But radical shifts weren’t her thing. I was the one who initiated the breakup, but it hurt like hell.”

Everyone nods with her, validates her. I find that I’m nodding, too.

“Breakup,” the fourth guest, wearing a hot pink sweater, grumbles. Her voice is tinged with a tone opposite of the cheery vibes her clothing gives off. “That word is too basic. Too simple to capture the entirety of what happened. A part of me has died! And everyone else just goes about their days like everything’s fine. How can the world look so gray while everyone else’s has color? It’s bullshit.”

“Not everyone’s worlds,” Daisy says, tipping her head toward the circle. To all of us. “If you leave this circle with anything, I hope it’s that you know none of you have to suffer in silence. You are not alone in this.”

“When Belinda died, I thought I’d follow shortly after,” an older man named Garen starts. His voice is quiet, requiring us to lean in to hear him better. “I still expect to roll over in the morning and see her there. And I can still feel her hand in mine.” He pauses to collect himself. “I still have all those damn throw pillows on the bed. I used to hate them, and now I can’t fall asleep without them.”

“Losing someone can be one of the most painful experiences we have,” Daisy says.

“It’s as though a part of me is missing,” Garen says, scratching his white beard. “The worst part is that when I think of our memories, I only find the ones I regret. The ones where I let my bad moods spoil what should’ve been joyous occasions. I think about our fights, as rare as they were.”

The silence after this is excruciating. I don’t know how to sit in this particular breed of discomfort.

“Recollecting memories has a funny way of doing that,” Chryssy says. I sit up straighter at her words, eager for more of them after the drought. “Your brain might be remembering the not-so-happy moments, but there were happy ones, too, right?”

The man stares at the empty seat in the circle. “Oh, sure. Many. For our first Christmas together, Belinda wanted a tree that wouldn’t die, but it couldn’t be plastic because that’d just end up in the landfill. So I brought home a cactus. Every Christmas, we’d decorate our outdoor cactus tree. I still have the scars from the annual light-stringing.”

The man looks at his arms. “I donated the lights the year after she…” He shakes his head. “But one bulb covering had rolled behind a few boxes. It’s like Belinda was telling me, not so fast .”

The group mutters acknowledgments, like they have similar stories of their own about the ghosts that haunt them.

“As soon as I saw that bulb, the first thought that came to mind wasn’t how special our tradition was,” Garen says. “I thought about the one year the lights went out and I didn’t bother replacing them. Probably ruined Christmas.”

“That’s just a thought, though, isn’t it?” Daisy gently presses.

“Did Belinda tell you Christmas was ruined?” Chryssy asks while she pets Goji.

Garen looks down at his hands. “Well, no. We did everything else the same that year. It was… wonderful.”

“Our inner voice has a lot to say, but it isn’t always right. And just because it has a lot to say, that doesn’t mean it’s who we are,” someone says.

Everyone’s eyes turn on me, and it’s then I realize I’m that someone.

Chryssy watches me, waiting to see if I’ll say anything else.

I don’t. What else is there to say?

After a prolonged silence, Chryssy speaks.

“My inner voice does a lot of talking, too,” she says. “In relationships, I’m always the one being left. That’s how I viewed myself for a long time. I never felt in control.” She keeps her gaze fixed on Goji. “But then I was reminded that I have done the leaving before. I left cardiology. I left med school. I even left love behind. I did these things, even when I was scared. When I did the leaving, that was me taking the situation into my own hands. When circumstances weren’t right, I made the change.”

“You didn’t let your inner voice win,” Ruth tells her.

Chryssy sits back, her imploring eyes locking with mine.

It’s a strange thing, being in this Heartbreak Circle. While I’ve always done the breaking, I’ve never done the listening. I may have had my reasons for ending relationships, but I also caused pain, annoyance, and confusion for many of my exes. All in the search for something perfect. For something my parents have— had .

The truth reverberates through me like a low note. Playing cello may have come easier for me, but I still had to work at it. Why did I think perfect love would come without effort?

“I thought I knew what perfect was. Turns out, I don’t have a clue,” I say, encouraged by Chryssy’s vulnerability. “The only thing that’s ever been flawless to me, I guess, is music. Notes I read, notes I play, notes I hear and feel.”

“And you do play them perfectly,” Penny interjects, holding her hands up like she’s not willing to hear otherwise.

I nod at her in thanks. “It’s just… I’ve always had somewhere to put my emotions. I translate whatever it is I’m feeling into music. It’s like an extension of me that lets the ache out.” I dig my heel deeper into the grass, grounding myself. “But now I’m wondering if all that was a distraction preventing me from learning how to sit with the discomfort.”

Is that what I’m doing now? Sitting with the uneasiness of my parents and trying to avoid it? Keeping my frustrations surface level and letting the pain out in the form of sad musical notes? Even if I were, is that so wrong?

But if I always had somewhere to redirect my emotions, then I’ve never had to live with them. I could avoid the uneasiness and consequences of the lack of relationships, rest, or recovery. The slipping away of time. Busy, busy, busy. Sacrifice from everyone in my life, including myself. What would it be like to exist with that? Address it, even?

Everything Chryssy’s been saying is true. My heart has been out of balance, and there’s some breakage there.

“I always thought my achievements would make my parents happy,” I add. “But their relationship had nothing to do with whether or not my brother and I were a success. Now they’re splitting up. My parents kept their separation from us for so long. I’m disappointed.” I pause, replaying my words. “Not in them, though. I mean, yes, it’s disappointing that they broke up. Sorry, I’m not good at talking about this stuff.”

I want to stop there, having said too much already, but Daisy urges me to go on.

“What I’m trying to say is, I’m disappointed in myself,” I say, closing my eyes as my cheeks burn at this reveal. I want to dissolve on the spot. Perish into a puddle on this heart-shaped chair. Evaporate and take everything I’ve just overshared with me.

And then… nothing.

I squint one eye open. I’m met with compassionate faces around the Heartbreak Circle, and it almost feels like the nights I cooked with Chryssy. Safe, patient, comforting. There’s room for me to sit with this.

Right away, I know deep down I’m not leaving this circle without sharing the rest of it.

“As much as my parents’ love story was—and frankly, still is—beautiful, I don’t know that a love like theirs is what I want at all.” I press on. “Not because they broke up, but because love can’t be replicated.” It’s like I told Chryssy in Las Vegas: Even if you play the same song over and over, it’ll always have its own subtle variations. “I need to play my own love song.”

My eyes float over the group’s faces until they find Chryssy. She’s frozen in place, like she’s been holding her breath this entire time. The tension in her seems to melt away a little when we look at each other. After days of silence, this moment of quiet connection is so loud.

Chryssy breaks eye contact first when Garen responds to what I’ve said.

“The music you make with someone you love is the sweetest sound you’ll ever hear,” he says. “You can count on that.”

“I believe it, Garen,” I say before turning in my seat to the woman next to him. “Penny, I appreciate your compliment. I didn’t always play flawlessly, though. Still don’t. When I first started playing cello, I spent all day in my room. There wasn’t enough time in the day for me to get as much playing in as I wanted. Then, in my middle school years, there was a stretch of time where playing became tedious. A chore, in a way. Fifteen minutes felt like a lifetime, when it had originally felt like a few seconds. Luckily, that didn’t last long.”

“What changed?” Penny asks.

“I started taking it note by note,” I share. “One note turned to two, three, four. Then I’d tell myself to play one piece. That was all I had to do for the day. Of course, once I got started, I played a lot more.”

“What if you started tackling each emotion note by note?” Garen muses.

I nod in agreement. “Emotions. But also relationships. Love. Flowers grow inch by inch, don’t they?” I ask, turning my focus solely on Chryssy. “Over time, maybe even after a long time, you get a garden. And the flowers, herbs, plants, they all die. But then they come back. And even if not all of them do, you’ve still got a garden, and probably a damn pretty one at that. Sometimes the garden is full, other years it won’t be. But the garden still exists.”

The world becomes blurry, a drop from above hitting my cheek. I look up expecting rain, but the sky is bright blue. I press my fingers against my eyes, feeling… tears?

“I’ve lost things in my life before,” I say directly to Chryssy, pushing on. “I refuse to lose you.”

“I can’t guarantee a lifetime together,” Chryssy says, moving closer to the edge of her seat and stirring Goji awake. “My heart’s handled it before. But with you? Not a chance.” She draws in a quick breath. “Vin, with our track records, we wouldn’t make it thirty-five months, let alone thirty-five years.”

The guests look intrigued—and slightly confused—but they don’t interrupt. Daisy doesn’t even try to redirect the conversation.

“I’ve chased perfection my entire life. In love, in my career. I practiced until my fingers bled to be flawless,” I say. “I’ve worked until I’ve gotten it right in everything but my relationships. But you know how we’ll at least try to get it right?”

A small gasp escapes Chryssy’s lips. “Practice,” she says, blushing as she laughs.

“Lots of practice,” I affirm. “It’s like you said. I wanted to be in love in a song. But it wasn’t until I met you that I realized that the songs I considered perfect were just illusions. And illusions leave you unsatisfied and alone. I want our love song to be better than perfect. I want it to be real.”

“Even if real doesn’t last forever?” Chryssy asks.

“Every song has a beginning and an ending. The very fact that nothing lasts forever is what makes something real and why it’s so important to appreciate it when you have it,” I say. “Anytime we put our hearts on the line, we’re all risking heartbreak. Chryssy, I want to find a rhythm of our own. I want to put my heart on the line. Show me where the hell that line is.”

“Are you just gonna sit there?” Garen asks me.

“Don’t let us get in your way,” Penny encourages.

I cross the circle and kneel in front of Chryssy. Goji looks back and forth between us, his nose twitching.

“Show me the line,” I whisper.

Chryssy’s cheeks fill with pink as she slowly holds out her hand to me. “Is this the line?”

I kiss the top of her hand.

“What about this?” she asks, pointing to her cheek.

I kiss that, too.

Chryssy points to her forehead. “Or maybe it’s here?”

I plant a kiss on her head.

“I think it’s here,” I say, brushing my thumb against her bottom lip.

“Put your heart on it,” she whispers.

I tip Chryssy’s chin back and kiss her squarely on the lips.

Everyone in the circle cheers.

Chryssy breaks into a smile that’s in direct competition with the sunshine, the stars, every beautiful symphony in existence. The laugh that follows is a song I want to hear for the rest of my life.

Then Chryssy strokes my cheek and says, “Let’s plant a garden.”