Get over it - by flying away

By Trevor Davis

"Get, get, get, get, get over it", entreated the rock group OK Go. But what it the best way to quickly haul yourself out of the slough of despair brought about when someone else says "thanks, but no thanks" to you? For many, the answer seems to be to get away - as far away as possible from places and people who, just for now, herald all-too-painful memories.

I speak from personal experience here. Big cities can seem very small indeed when somebody close decides ties are best severed - that constrictive feeling in your chest is matched by the slightly hostile, harder edge that once-comfortable sights and sounds now harbour. What seemed comfortable and welcoming is now most certainly not.

But it won't be this way forever - often the vanquished one is best served expanding his or her horizons by flying off into the sunset and licking their wounds somewhere new, somewhere fresh and challenging for the mind, even if only for a matter of days or weeks.

Myself, having wrestled for a couple of weeks with what it meant to have come out of a two-and-a-half-year relationship, I decided that it was definitely time to get away. And it was easy. Quick email to a mate in New York, quick gasp of breath while I further hammered the nail into my credit card debt coffin, and before you know it IU was flying across the Atlantic for the very first time.

And a good trip it was, too. As well as the obvious sights and intoxicating vibe offered by arguably the world's most energetic city, it was time to ratchet the confidence up a notch. The English accent has a reputation for making American girls weak at the knees and although I have very much doubted the veracity of this myth it proved pretty accurate over the course of a couple of weeks. Never before had I attracted so much female attention simply by being overhead speaking in a bar - and it made for two weeks which were, if not sizzling with passion, not dull and perhaps smoothing a few rough wounds enough to make me thing I might, just might, still have "got it".

I returned to London that little bit more refreshed and, while the next few months were in truth not an easy ride, going somewhere completely new and getting that bit of extra perspective on things definitely played its part in making life a touch easier. And half a year later, a month-long trip to football's World Cup went a long way towards reminding me that life way, most definitely, for the living and looking forward.

Others have taken the post-break-up getaway to extremes, mind you. One friend of mine was in such turmoil about the cessation by his long-term other half of their relationship that he flew straight away - literally straight away - to the Maldives. In that Indian Ocean paradise he undertook a self-reinvention not dissimilar to that undergone by Lord Jim, the eponymous tragic hero of Joseph Conrad's novel. Staying out there for over a year, he became a leading standard-bearer against an oppressive regime, writing cutting and incisive articles for an English-language newspaper and gaining a stunning Sri Lankan belle for his troubles. And sure, he came back eventually, sans Sri Lankan but very much with a new passion for life. He's never looked back. When the bottom of the world seems to have fallen out, sometimes it's not so bad to take the jump.