A Fold Apart Helped Me Break Up With My Ex

Trigger warnings: Abusive relationship, self-harm.

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I haven’t heard a lot of devastating personal news in my life so far. I’ve gotten a few phone calls about deaths in the family, the one hitting me the most being the death of my childhood dog, but there’s only been one text that shook me to my core, that I feel, in some way, altered me forever.

It’s when I got the text that my ex-girlfriend, whom I had just broken up with, was in the hospital for stabbing herself in the leg.

I remember where I was with a sharp clarity surrounded by other hazy memories from that same time: I was working at Chipotle in June 2020 and went on a break, checked my phone, and saw dozens of missed phone calls and texts about the incident. My vision went blurry and I went to the bathroom, where I started to hyperventilate. Approaching some sort of panic attack, I called my friend, walking outside to the outdoor seating area. Speaking a mile per minute in a manner I’m sure was barely comprehensible, I cried about how I had done this, how my series of decisions had led to my ex being in the hospital, and how if she died, GOD, IF SHE DIED, her blood would be on my hands. Inconsolable, I screamed bloody murder at the top of my lungs just as one of the day’s first customers walked in the door, muttering a polite “Sorry you’re going through it, man.”

It took a lot of therapy to accept the truth that, no, her blood was not on my hands in any way. Yes, I had made poor decisions that could have led to the outcome, but at the end of the day, people who engage in self-harm or suicide make their own choices for their own reasons, almost always related in some way to mental health. I have struggled in the past with milder forms of self-harm and suicidal ideation, and if I accept that nobody directly made me do or want to do these things to myself, I have to accept the same for how I’ve affected others.

But God, it doesn’t make it hurt any less.

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A Fold Apart is a generally forgettable mobile game that remains unforgettable in my mind because it, in part, contributed to the previously mentioned event.

The least of our relationship problems were because we were in a long-distance relationship (in hindsight, I’m very grateful we were long-distance because things could have gotten a lot scarier if we were dating in person), but that’s nonetheless what we were in, especially distant due to the pandemic going on at the time. An intern for Paste Magazine’s games section at the time, I made the pretty simple connection between A Fold Apart being about a long-distance relationship and my own relationship and pitched an essay about it for the site. It got approved, I wrote the first draft and I received my first round of edits.

That’s as far as the essay ever went.

To say that writing the essay is what made me realize the relationship wasn’t working would be too simple, but it may have been a straw that broke the camel’s back. My editor told me my description of our meeting in person after three months apart came back “a little flat,” encouraging me to dive into more romantic language about how reuniting made me feel. I explored my own feelings to find that what I felt most wasn’t love, but fear.

My ex made me afraid. I was afraid that anything I said or did would make her blow up either at me or herself. I was afraid of her own ex, who was threatening both her and myself for being together. I was afraid of how the relationship was affecting my own well-being. But most of all, I was afraid of what might happen if I ended it. In the end, I suppose I was right to be afraid.

Fear is powerful, but it isn’t a good or healthy reason to do just about anything. Even avoiding scary things, such as, say, a deadly virus, is better done through logic and reason than pure terror.

I had been avoiding this fear for a long time, but when sitting down to write that paragraph about how I loved my girlfriend so much, I had to stare it in the face. Was I really going to lie about how I felt for a published work that would be out in the world forever?

No.

It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and the immediate consequences were undoubtedly traumatic, but I’m so glad I got out of that relationship when I did. For what it’s worth, it taught me a lot about what to avoid and watch out for in relationships and being single can be much better than being in an unhealthy relationship.

That’s one of the wonderful things about art, even unmemorable, unimpressive works of art like A Fold Apart. I hated how the couple in that game stayed together despite their obvious problems that were basically brushed away, and I hated even more how their problems looked like small potatoes compared to our own. Art has a funny way of making us take a hard look in the mirror, and “bad” art can sometimes be the best at this.

I’m in a very happy relationship now. And as an exercise to prove that I’m definitely not deluding myself again here, I’d like to quickly write about how much I love my current partner:

I love cuddling on the couch while we watch TV. I love how every time we say the same thing at the same time, we have a ritual of saying “babe” three times in sequence and then trying to say the same thing at the same time again. (We’ve gotten it a handful of times!) I love their silly imitation of JFK giving a speech in Minionese, which makes me giggle uncontrollably every time. I love how I can still get lost in their eyes as they’re talking to me about Taylor Swift or Death Note or Animal Crossing and instead of being mad at me losing the plot, I get to see those eyes twinkle all the brighter when I say I got lost in them once again.

But most of all, I love how, for the first time in my life, I’m in a relationship born out of true love and celebration of each other, not fear.

In some weird butterfly effect, A Fold Apart was a part of leading me to the person I’m meant to be with.

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Joseph Stanichar is a freelance entertainment journalist with bylines in publications such as Game Informer, Paste Magazine and Looper. He also has a day job writing about local news for a local newspaper. When not playing video games or writing, he loves building LEGOs and acting in community theater productions.