Heartbreaks

There’s this thing, this time when your heart breaks. It’s not the first time – you remember that time with a clarity that stops your breath, leaves you lightheaded and reeling, grasping the walls for support. Whether it’s disappointment that caused it, or what you thought was love spurned, or a thousand other reasons, that first true heartbreak stays with you, sticks and never leaves your memory. If you think about it for a moment, you can taste again the salt of your own tears, feel the pressure on your chest.

And it’s not the great heartbreak either – everyone has one of those. When it’s not just your heart breaking, but your entire life, everything you’ve built for yourself, breaking and crumbling. And as horrific as your first heartbreak was, you know that this is the big one, the one that all others will forever be compared to. It’s the heartbreak of knowing that you have damned yourself and your life so fully that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, you can do that will right it. There is no way that you can struggle back from the precipice, and pull yourself together, and even PRETEND to keep functioning as you were. That heartbreak is usually followed by hours of alternating comatose behavior (curled in a ball in bed, or sitting blankly in your favorite chair) and frantic and frenetic activity (mad cleaning spurts, hours spent exercising until you are ready to vomit or die or pass out, whichever comes first). But somehow, the break is what does it – it severs you enough from the past that while you don’t start over, you start fresh enough to pretend.

But those are not the worst heart breaks… Though we think of them as the worst, they are not.

The worst heartbreaks are the ones that come silently, sneak up on you while you are eating dinner with friends, or watching a movie with a loved one, or answering the phone at your job. Any facet of your life is not safe from these quiet endings. Because you will be there, and everything will be fine, and like a thunderstorm in a canyon, in the blink of an eye you are flooded with emotion that you are no more equipped to handle than if you had been handed paper wings and shoved off a cliff with instructions to fly.

These silent heartbreaks come, cutting you off in mid-sentence, mid-word, mid-thought, and numb you so that you cannot process anything around them. There is no help and no salvation from them, you must simply ride them, accept the endlessly deep and painful melancholy that pours into your soul with each nanosecond. And eventually, just as you learned to move on from your first heartbreak, and your great heartbreak, you learn to function with these silent ones.

Though you cannot seem to finish a thought when it hits you, your body takes over and carries on. You continue to smile and laugh while you fight the urge to scream. Forced grin takes residence upon your lips and will not leave and the pain of smiling is so much that you think maybe, just maybe, you can cry because of that and it will be fine.

But even then, the tears do not come. It’s as if you can function socially, but emotionally you are so adrift and lost that you wouldn’t be able to process anything approaching the correct reaction. So it all builds up. And you excuse yourself – perhaps to use the restroom, to refill your drink, to have a cigarette. And you stand away, shaking inside so badly that your bones are castanets for the wayward demon that has plagued you in these continual achings. Perhaps you are lucky enough that you finally cry, finally let loose those tears that you were sure were coming if only you could let them.

And then you take a deep breath, lick your lips – if you taste salt, a quick brush of hand over face takes care of that – and return to your place. And you go back to life as normal.

And the silent heartbreaks keep coming. And you wonder what will happen the day your body stops handling them. And you realize there is no pain so deep as what you are feeling now, when you are so heartbroken all of the time that you cannot think through it, you simply live in it daily.

That is heart break.

Random Writings, pt 1

Random writings, since I keep getting these urges to scribble but can't really think of a great story to put them in.

-------------------

The heat is pressing in on me, a lead blanket I can't quite escape. I can feel the air stirring around me, a degree or so cooler than my own body, but it doesn't relieve me, merely brushes the small hairs on my arm, making me itchy as well as pressured. I shift, a slight motion to the right, my head lolling on the pillow, eyes closed. The air smells stale and lived in, the results of being crammed elbow to elbow with a hundred other strangers who I nevertheless share something intrinsic with. But over that stale scent, canned air hissing slightly in the room, is something vaguely organic

Sweet and musky all at once, a perfume applied too liberally to truly cover the vulgarities a body will commit when stuck in one position for too long. It causes a cough, a muttered remark, but nothing too loud - for we are sleeping here, a deep slumber that ought not to be disturbed. A bit of turbulence, a bump that lifts us all and drops us, annoying in that it promises movement but fails to deliver enough to redirect the air flow. And now another scent leaks out, cigarette smoke, a cloying odor that tickles the nose awkwardly, trying to induce memories of what once was.

I am annoyed, because I cannot have a cigarette. I ache for one, a bone deep ache that cannot be satisfied on this flight, and wonder how in the hell others were lucky enough to sneak one in. I consider calling out, but all around me are the still bodies in the darkness - I can feel their pressure, so close to me. Let it not be said I am unkind enough to wake others from the tremulous respite of sleep they might have entered. Still, I long for it enough that my lungs seem to burst with the urge to inhale the toxins, so lovingly and temptingly presented in cylindrical tubes and so far from me.

The voices have faded, moved away from me, and soon I am lost to dark and disturbing dreams. I am a crow in them - no bright butterfly flitting on the winds and exploring a vibrant world of color. No, my slumbering landscape is filled with shadows, drawn by a heavy hand and smudged by a mind that does not wish to think - I have shades of gray and black, moving against each other, the difference so slight and yet I keep yearning towards the horizon, where there is one strip of what might be lighter color.

A sunrise? A new beginning to break this endless dusk that has settled on my soul and vision, I hope for it with a vague realization that this is, in fact, the first hope I ever have had. All others are mere extensions and revisions of this base hope, and none of them can come to pass without this first. I yearn towards it, but in sleep, I am unable to make progress.

Eternity and nanosecond are equal, and equally without meaning, in this shadowland we exist in. It occurs to me that none even the heat I feel is real - mere sense memory of a place and time I might have once lived in, brought to mind by the name the crew calls this ship. And so they ferry us on, in what they call the Phoenix ship, bodies whose souls are still trapped within, yearning for reincarnation. We have flown these underworld skies for years, and mere seconds.