It never gets any easier, not when you’re 15 and you *feel* your body rip to shreds at the mere thought of *it* being over. Not at 22, when all of your life plans made around *that* relationship fall to pieces, and you spend an entire summer wailing along with Melissa Etheridge’s, “Like The Way I Do.” Not when you’re 51, and your long-deceased marriage is finally declared dead (that’s actually an entirely different sort of ache), nor four years later when your rebound “what-you-thought-would-only-be-a-2-week-fantasy-fling” flames out due to kids, and work, and politics, that pandemic puppy that you knew was not a good idea. They all hurt. But at 55, what compounds the pain, is the knowledge that you *will* get through it (because you always have). You can’t wallow in bed all summer, you can’t cry all night on the phone with your bestie (because *he* was your bestie,) you can’t even eat a pint of Ben and Jerry’s (because then you’d *really* feel like shit). Balancing the *knowledge* that you’re going to be just fine, with deep the pain of the heart is so completely unsatisfying. You might as well get over it already. Maybe, I’m a glutton for punishment. Maybe, I *like* wallowing, maybe, just maybe, being a grown up kinda sucks that way, and sometimes, what you *really need* is a sad, sad song on the radio and a drippy mascara cry while you walk the dog in the early morning light. (Even as the sun shines through the trees and you hear yourself thinking, “You’re going to be alright.”)