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.