I was 20, with no idea how to fall out of love. These things saved me

My son is turning 20 – soon he will be post-teenage and I can hardly believe it. He says: “Sometimes everything feels kind of pointless.” And I switch between agreeing and showing him footage of Ken Kesey, fresh out of jail, saying: “You only come to this movie once and if you don’t get something rewarding out of every minute you’re sitting there, then you’re blowing your ticket.”

What were you like at my age? My son never asks, and so I never tell him that 20 was a year of great chance and great change. For most of it I was in the vale of tears after being dumped by my first boyfriend, and I stayed there for a while. Coming of age is the end of magical thinking. In the borderlands between child and adult where there’s all that white space to project onto, a kind of “teenage voyance” can occur, a dreaming into being.

Back when that boyfriend was just a wish, I’d imagined us as one of those couples, the ones who dress alike, go everywhere together and engage in hearty public displays of affection. My crush was totalising. It generated earnest poetry and deep reading. I did not seek advice or clarity from friends, only from fiction. Reading 1970s cl***ic The Women’s Room by Marilyn French – “This book changes lives!” – I felt recognition tingles when feminist Val lets loose on the life cycle of a love affair: “Well, in time, you sort of get together. Your p***ion is so extreme that no other possibility exists. And someplace you know that. You know that somehow you made this happen.”

I didn’t meet his parents. I was not that kind of girlfriend. I’d catch the train to his house in the rich suburb and wait out the front for him to sneak me in. Then I would be happily trapped in his bedroom, where the clothes drawers still bore the old Mum-labels (JOCKS, SOCKS, T-SHIRTS). We’d listen to records and fool around and eat packet pasta and smoke and we’d talk and talk and talk and talk. (“What do you think I’ll look like when I’m old?” I asked once, fishing. “Fat,” he said, without hesitation. His mum had a vibrating belt machine in their bedroom, a contraption I coveted for its retro appearance and numinous potential.)

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead,” wrote Sylvia Plath in Mad Girl’s Love Song. “(I think I made you up inside my head.)”

Choose a song to soundtrack this falling-in-love montage – something by the Byrds or the Turtles, maybe. Imagine me and him and him and me, holding hands and pashing on trams and rolling around in parks. We’re tying up the family phone, twining the cord around our fingers. We’re playing house, getting drunk, having hangovers, having fights, making up. I love you, I love you. Do you love me?

Love for a person can be like love for an object – or is it that the person becomes an object, every bit as resonant and vital and self-making as a book or a film or the right pair of shoes? Love is a delusion, or at the very least a distraction. First love is the worst.

At 20, I got the record store job. I just walked in and asked for it. The first weeks I was taking inventory, idling in the stacks out the back, listening to my co-workers as they cleaned and graded records and besmirched each other’s music choices. The culture was jokey, cynical, but there was a tenderness beneath it, a feeling of misfits flung together.

As well as this part-time work, I was giving uni another go; it was on the same tramline as my boyfriend’s house. I’d start out with good intentions, then jump off early, call him from a phone booth. I’d wait outside his house. Even if I didn’t know where he was, or how long he’d be, even though I sensed he was going off me, I hung around. A lurksome lurker. A louche loiterer. A limpet. I thought once you’d shown yourself to someone, you had to stay with them forever.

Everything I’d ever read taught me how to fall in love, but nothing taught me how to fall out of it. I tried to ward off our inevitable breakup with visits to Kerry Kulkens’ magic shop. She was a formidable suburban witch with wild black hair and a gothic vibe. She sold crystals, rune stones, tarot cards, amulets, love spells. She also gave readings. I hoped she’d tell me my instincts were wrong, that everything was going to be OK. I tried to pretend I was worried about my future career – not love, because that felt so shameful and cliched – but she knew. She was a witch, after all.

In the end our break-up was staggered. It had to be, because I was so resistant. I had exit issues. There were attempts at being just friends, or friends-with-benefits. If I had made him up inside my head, then why was the unmaking so hard? I went into damage control. I made mix tapes and sent them to him in the mail with poems and little cards with drawings of clouds inspired by Yoko Ono. At work I played The End of the World and Three Cigarettes in an Ashtray and blubbed all over my workmates, who had heard it all before.

They gave me cups of tea and books for distraction: Pop. 1280, Hollywood Babylon, Mommie Dearest, Hellfire, The Teachings of Don Juan, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Music also soothed. I lingered over the covers of 1970s queendom: Barbra Streisand, Carly Simon, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Rita Coolidge. I liked their smooth hair and overalls, their country quilts and parlour palms. If I was about to move into a new introspective phase of my life, these ladies could surely lead the way.

I officially dropped out of uni. I changed my brand of cigarettes. I got my first tax return and bought an electric typewriter. I was writing all the time. But never about him.

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A story by Carson McCullers felt like a lesson. A boy gets drawn into hearing a drunk man’s tale. The man was once so in love that it felt like when he was with his woman all the things laying loose about his life were gathered together through her. She left him and at first all he could do was search for her. Years p***ed and then it was like she was chasing him. Not literally – he still didn’t know where she was – but as he walked around he was swamped by memories. He started to formulate a science about love. He saw that he’d gone about it all wrong, starting at the end like that.

“Do you know how a man should love? Son, do you know how love should be begun? A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud. Son, I can love anything.”

The tattoo came first. It felt wildly transgressive back then. (The wisdom was that if you had visible tattoos you’d never get a job – ha!) The tattooist warned me it would hurt because it was close to the bone, but I told her I could handle it, and I did. The car came next. I saved up for months. A 1967 Holden HR, hospital green with a stick shift and bench seats and a wooden c***ette tray made by the previous owner.

Finally, my dog, a black and anxious bundle of fur, adopted from the Lost Dogs’ Home. I fed him and walked him and he dug up my garden and chewed my books and jumped off the roof of the Punters Club. He sniffed the wind from the p***enger seat when I drove around with my mix tapes playing – the ones I made for myself. I never drove back to the old places. When I thought about my ex-boyfriend, I almost felt embarr***ed – was any of it real? A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud. A Tattoo. A Car. A Dog. I could love anything. Well. I could try.