The "break" in Heartbreak

Fall in love and you’ll write a poem, 3 love letters, and a love song.
Get your heart broken and you get an Adele album and years of slam poetry…

Do you know what it sounds like?
When a heart cracks? 

Nothing.
It sounds like nothing.
Your phone doesn't chime with text messages, it doesn't ring with phone calls, you have no voicemails, no emails.
 It sounds like nothing.
And somehow the silence is murderous.
 Deafening.
And you feel it in your bones.
Literally in your bones.

You try so hard to go about your daily life,
but even the simplest things are hard.
You hate everything they touched.
Even Oxygen.

They invaded all the space you needed to breathe,
and even now every breath still tastes like them.
Tainted.
Warped.

Eventually lost laughs turn into memories you can’t even remember.
What did it sound like when they said your name?
Do you remember the way their voice held those syllables?
The way their lips caressed sweet nothings?

You think about your last kiss, wishing it were a scene in a movie, but it wasn’t.
It was something so simple and chaste and brief that it was swept away before you could even commit it to memory.

You sit alone at night drinking wine like tea,
wishing the silence wasn’t eating you alive.
But it is.
It so is.

Eventually you start to heal.
You tell yourself you’re fine enough times that things become easier.

But it only takes one thing to derail you.
Just a glimpse of a shirt they wore.
One sniff of their body wash.
The beginning of a song they used to sing.
That’s all it takes and suddenly you’re starting over.

The heart breaks again and you get to start at the beginning.
Rinse and repeat.
Rinse and repeat.
Rinse and repeat.

You spend your whole life dreaming of all your firsts.
Your first kiss.
First sex.
First love.
But you never dream of the first time your heart will be severed.

No one ever prepares you for the way the broken shards of your heart will puncture your lungs and the pain it is to breathe.

You can love someone who doesn’t love you back,
and you can be loved by someone you don’t love back,
but you’ll never understand which is worse;
breaking someone or being broken…

So after you sit in silence.
After you absorb the nothingness.
Stop rinsing.
Stop repeating.

Pick yourself up off the floor.
Remind yourself that there’s room to love yourself too.
You don’t have to stop loving them.
You don’t have to give up the corner they’ve made in your soul.
You don’t have to do what your friends say.
You don’t have to stop missing them or start hating them.

But you do have to give yourself the space to be yourself.

Eventually you and your ex will become parallel lines.
They’ll go their path and you’ll go yours.
But you’re both still moving.

Do not spend time wondering if or when you'll get hurt again.
If someone gave you a car alarm heart, learn to sing along.
Chasing someone who doesn't catch you says more about you than it does about them.

You're a fighter.
A winner.
A flyer.

Remember that butterflies can’t see their wings, but they’re still beautiful.
You are a butterfly.
You are beautiful and colorful,
and today
you Fly.