on being broken

I keep on trying to put words to this broken heart but everything feels tired and clichéd and said before and felt before by a million people with broken hearts throughout time. And at moments I find comfort in that. It hurts so much, I believe for fleeting seconds I am the only person who has ever felt this way. Though I know this is not true. I cannot imagine another heart bearing the weight in which mine knows at this very moment. How can an experience like this be simultaneously so universal and so singular? I would love to write a clever story or an anecdote on how it felt to sit on the wood floor of his apartment and watch like surgery my heart be taken from my chest, sliced open and disassembled artery by artery. I wish I could be a character in this one and tell you how she felt, how she cried, how in the Las Vegas airport, the strangest of all places to cry she drew her knees to her chest and sobbed as a slot machine that kept ringing in the key of C.

It is amazing how we can share so wholly ourselves and our life and our secret spaces with someone and how swiftly those passages are closed, boarded up, and cemented over as if they were never there. Our avenues into each other have been rerouted into dead ends and fast vines are trying to cover our tracks. People grow so close and then in an instant so unbelievably far away. It is the most terrifying lesson I have ever learned. I am chewing on my own words, reciting my own lessons, my melodies on how we as people cannot keep other people. I learn this lesson yet again.

I keep using the phrase broken heart, and I cannot say how perfectly apt the word broken feels. I am no longer working the way it did before nor will I ever again. At some point I will work in a new way. To be broken is to be temporarily set aside from yourself. I must learn the trade in order to craft myself back together. I do not know where all the pieces go but I will reassemble them in a new order until it works again and maybe someday, loves again. I do not know who I will be next. On the very good moments that flash like small seizures in my mind I can see her. I can catch a swift scent of who I will become because of this. I cannot wait to meet her. But until then, we grieve.