Broken Heart Logistics
 Have you ever been walking down the street when suddenly, your heart falls right out of your mouth? There it is, that pulsing, pathetic thing, writhing there on the sidewalk when it should be safely in your chest. The cool spring evening sends a breeze over it, and you watch as it stops and crumbles. Sometimes it might shatter, but more often it just crumbles - falls apart into tiny little pieces. You scoop the pieces up and put them into the pocket of your sweater, along with the used tissue and plastic twist-tie. There they knock around like pebbles in your shoe after the playground. 

And suddenly there's a huge gaping hole in your chest where something used to be. But you can't exactly remember what, because that little fucker called Doubt runs up behind you and snatches all the certainty, confidence and hope you've been carrying around lately. And you can't feel your feet on the sidewalk, even though you know you're there. It's surreal, like the Las Vegas strip. You can't tell what's real or not and any moment the earth could spin just a bit faster and you could fly off into darkness. 

You can't tell whether you should fight or flight, so you do both, simultaneously, and trip over your own feet. Your pride is stuck to the bottom of your shoe and the whole thing is disgusting.

And everything you thought you knew about people and love seems so very far away - like the songs you once learned in school that are barely audible anymore. The silence of so much unspoken drowns out the traffic and even though you saw this coming, you can't help but feel utterly, unexpectedly, broken. 

Torn between throwing everything you have at their feet in one last desperate attempt to keep the thing you wanted most dearly and hurling yourself in front of the cars beside you, you become immobile. Neither option seems very dignified. 

And all the reassurances that you're lovely and great and that it isn't you mean absolutely nothing, as you stand there while everything that seems to matter drains away in one quick, impersonal flush. 

As you drive home, you keep thinking that maybe it shouldn't hurt this much, and maybe you shouldn't be so sensitive, and maybe you're making a big deal out of nothing. But you notice that you've been covering your chest with your arm this entire time, because that big gaping hole is still there. And the pieces of your heart are still knocking around like pebbles in your shoe. 





At least there's no one to blame in this affair, except myself. I may have called too often or wanted too much or felt too deeply. And it surprises me, how much this matters. Yesterday was also my ninth wedding anniversary, which is ironic (and not). I haven't felt this way since ... well, I can't remember. I know that relationships change (because people do), but all the other transitions in the past few years have either been more graceful or less significant. I know that I'll live and be fine, but that's the funny thing about your heart shattering - you aren't ever the same. To carry the metaphor even further, if you please....we find ways of putting it back together. But it's rearranged differently and it might not even fit quite right for a while. And even while you wonder if it's just better to stay in the basement and stop trying to love people, you know that you could no more stop loving than to stop breathing, because they're the same. 





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PS: Some of you have asked for details about whom or why or how ...honestly, I'm not sure how much that matters, because I'm not sure how personal it all is. But to answer: I don't know why, and I'm still trying to figure that out, and I'm not sure I'll really ever understand it. Right now it doesn't make any sense. Who is a friend I admire and adore, who's also the coolest person I've met in a long while. (how's that for being non-specific?!) I think they're probably as confused as I am, but I don't really know. And how - well, I think it was completely accidental. It just happened to be a big accident, like a train wreck with smoke and flames. Or a small one. Again, I don't really know.