Words by Luca Rudenstine PZ ’26, Graphic by Izzy Young PZ ’28

Fiona Apple’s Parting Gift isn’t a breakup song so much as a group memo to an alumni association of exes. She once said it was written “to all of the men I have known,” which instantly shifts it from private heartbreak to mass correspondence: subject line, Your Services Are No Longer Required.

Amidst my own teary breakup last winter, the resonant tune became deeply personal. As a concoction of rage and longing arose within me, Apple’s lyricism captured the double-exposure of goodbyes. Take the refrain:

“It ended bad but I love what we started
It said stop
But we went on wholehearted
It ended bad but I love what we started.”

This is a confession without revision, a goodbye that still admits its beauty. The line refuses to simplify romance into either/or. The love was genuine, the wreckage equally so. Instead of ironing that contradiction into something neat, Apple repeats it like a stutter, letting the paradox stand: regret and gratitude bound up in the same breath. It’s a reminder that closure is rarely clean; it’s more like a palimpsest – hurt written right over love.

That lyrical ambivalence is where the humor creeps in. Apple calls her exes a “silly, stupid pastime” and still insists she “loved what [they] started.” It’s a sly jab at the cultural script that demands women exit relationships graciously, with thanks for the memories. Apple does thank them, but the thanks is edged with mockery, like a parting gift you didn’t ask for and don’t quite want.

Most pop goodbyes try to canonize heartbreak as something noble. Apple’s farewell is more complicated, more human. It’s a eulogy with a wink. When my ex told me he learned a great deal from cheating on me, I remember slyly telling him, “it was a lesson I never had to learn.” At the time, his voice had carried the impossible request: be open. Not because he wanted true freedom, but because he couldn’t bear to lose me entirely. He was in transition then – halfway between the life he had known and the one he was trying to build. I refused. It had to be all or nothing. He couldn’t choose all. 

But there’s one lyric of hers I could never fully claim:

“I bet you could never tell
That I knew you didn’t know me that well
It is my fault you see
You never learned that much from me.”

For Apple, the pain is being unseen, unstudied, dismissed as simple. Unlike her universal message, my ex knew me – deeply, sometimes unbearably so. In our last conversation, nothing about me was invisible to him. When he told me I had given him the gift of grace, it wasn’t a hollow parting line; it was a truth spoken by someone who had watched me grow into myself under his gaze. And I could tell him, without irony, that I had learned how to love in his company. If Apple’s lyric is a lament for the intimacy that never was, mine is a recognition that intimacy did happen – messy, flawed, unrepeatable, but real.

That conversation has stayed lodged in me like a sculpture I can’t stop circling. We choreograph beginnings but rarely endings. Take weddings, housewarmings – all ribbon-cutting ceremonies, all sealed with kisses in front of witnesses. But when the structure of love collapses, we are left without a form, no agreed-upon ritual for goodbye. No equivalent of Rodin’s marble embrace – only rough drafts of parting, improvised gestures that never quite hold the weight. Why isn’t the dismantling of a relationship given equal staging? Why isn’t there an agreed-upon ritual for goodbye?

Instead, we improvise. In my case, the first version of closure was the sound of my own breath in my bedroom after the call. A familiar room, suddenly unrecognizable. The moon still hung in the same spot in the sky, his letters still taped to my wall, but something in the air had shifted. No vigil. No final kiss to consecrate the ending. Just the efficient violence of a voice I loved saying something I could not accept.

And now, here he was. The same eyes. The same scent – natural deodorant and Versace cologne – closed in on me as we hugged. For a moment, my body wanted to fold into him, to be carved back into the marble intimacy of The Kiss: two figures fused, timeless, unbreakable. But our bodies withheld. A sliver of air remained, our torsos almost but not quite touching, like a crack running through stone. He is not a villain in my story, there is no operatic betrayal to fix him to. Just a man who miscalculated tenderness, reminding me that most endings don’t arrive cleanly.

Guilt is not always sharp. Sometimes it’s soft, pliable, like fabric you absentmindedly twist in your hands before realizing you’ve been holding it for hours. That’s the kind I feel with him. There have been new people, new memories, and a new sense of self-assurance that has settled after re-finding myself in new countries, that makes me feel almost unrecognizable. And yet – I still text him. Still leave space for his voice on the other end of the line. It’s a strange, slow rationing of goodbye.

When he says he still wants to be with me and only me, it is not the confession I once fantasized about. It is heavy now – with all the months and people in between, his mistakes and my own, the quiet exchange of our skin for the illusion of closure. In that weight, I hear the myth of reconciliation: the idea that if two people still want each other, the math should work out. But the equation ignores erosion.

I love him, but I don’t want to be with him. For so long I believed those two truths couldn’t exist side by side – something cowardly, selfish, an act of keeping someone tethered without granting them the whole of you. And yet, across the table, I felt the familiar rush of love, as undeniable as ever, and I knew that feeling will never entirely go away. Was it muscle-memory or true permanence? The compromise we once called learning alongside each other but growing independently – together when we’re together, apart when we’re apart – now feels like a way of using him for intimacy. And God, we are so good at slipping back into it.. But my first love is not an heirloom I can keep on a shelf without it rotting. It must transform – into gratitude, into reflection, into space for whoever walks into your life next.

This is the trouble with the narrative of “moving on” we’ve inherited: it assumes love either renews itself or it dies cleanly. In reality, it often does neither. Sometimes it lingers, the way a coat you haven’t worn in months still carries your perfume—now layered with the dusty sweetness of mothballs. One scent says, remember how it felt when he looked at you like that. The other says, for God’s sake, get your knitwear dry-cleaned. That’s love, I think. That’s grief. Two scents woven together – desire and repellent.

And this time, I got my closure. He told me I had given him grace; I told him I had found myself in his love. We saw each other wholly – no shadows left unlit – and in that space, we honored it. Apple’s parting gift was mockery; mine was recognition. Different songs, same ending. I learned what it was to truly love and be seen through love, and that, I will carry like a pulse under my skin forever.

When we hugged goodbye, I thought again of The Kiss. At first glance, it’s nothing but devotion: two bodies fused in timeless embrace. But the sculpture was meant for The Gates of Hell, a monument to eternal torment. That embrace, then, is not salvation. It is desire frozen, caught inside a larger damnation. You can feel the inevitability pressing in: whatever this is, it cannot last.

He hugged me hard. I hugged him back. And in that moment I understood: it is possible to hold someone with everything you have and still already be walking away.