breakup notes from a love story i made up in my head, by Catherine Shonack

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

breakup notes from a love story i made up in my head is for the hopeless romantics who dream in the daylight and trip over themselves in the process. It’s inspired by the people who come into our lives for a short amount of time, a few hours or a few days at most, and change them in ways they’ll never know. It traces how the fantasy of someone lingers longer than they did, how it replaces what we know about someone until that’s all that’s left.

How does a dreamer know when it’s time to come back to earth? How long does it take to get a over a what-if? Perhaps, the narrator questions, it’s in the falling that the healing happens, and in the time it takes a hopeless romantic to learn to fly again. When the quality of connection is so strong it makes a day feel like years, the length of a relationship becomes irrelevant. When you’ve lived so long with a fantasy, separating it from the truth can be nearly impossible.

The poems oscillate between healing and backtracking, moving forward only to get swept away by the fantasy once again, and the non-linear manner in which people endeavor to move on from someone who was not meant for them.

Catherine Shonack is a writer from Los Angeles who currently resides in Brooklyn. She obtained her master’s degree in playwriting and dramaturgy at the University of Glasgow. Her poems have been featured on the Kirkstall Poetry Trail and published in Ink Sweat & Tears and Abundance Literary Magazine. Her radio play How to Drive in the Dark was performed at ChapelFM as part of their Writing on Air Festival in 2024. She’s currently working on a historical fantasy novel about the golden age of piracy.