You met up at the coffee shop so you could give back her favorite novelty mug. You hoped that the handoff might lead to one more conversation, one more chance for a make up, but you are walking back to your home alone.
Your home is a treehouse 40 feet up, hidden in the woods outside the college, powered by solar panels scattered among the branches. Once, in a lovedrunk act of technical prowess, you'd installed a splitter on the campus library router, then directed its signal to the secret mesh router installed in the rarely visited rooftop rare book room. You did this so free wifi would blanket the forest, but also to impress the cute coworker sharing that late night work-study shift with you. The move worked, and the internet still worked now, but the two of you did not. You went from coworkers to lovers to something else that you're not quite ready to name.
It's late, and dark, but you can follow the path of luminescent flowers you'd planted, which guide you to your tree. You swipe your bracelet along the trunk and wait for the pulleyed foyer to descend and carry you up, so you can lay face down on the treehouse floor and sob while yr Waxahatchee record plays on repeat.
And yes this is terrible, and yes the heart sucks, and today was a straight-up misery. But you are also cradled in the branches of your home tree, in a room fed by the sun and lit by the moon, crying next to a planter of just-sprouted seedlings, their thin stems glowing soft green. Love is still tough in the future, but life is impossibly sweet. With pitiful irony you remind yourself that all of this, from your home to your heartbreak, you did yourself.