What A Broken Heart Really Feels Like

It’s waking up from a dream and reaching your arm across the bed, only to have it fall flat on the sheets. It’s when your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere and you can’t get a signal. It’s choking on your own vomit. It’s watching your life through a window. It’s settling for the nice boy. It is a self-inflicted wound that lingers and scars and bubbles on your skin, that you hope nobody will notice. Don’t worry; they’ll say they didn’t. It’s a debilitating grief that begins your chest and your fingertips and your eyelids. It’s forgetting how to breathe and not knowing if you want to remember. It’s the little moments where you think about his hand on your waist or his breath on your collarbone and your stomach sinks a little lower and you grab the wall for support. It’s praying to something or someone that maybe one day you’ll feel that way again. It’s finding beauty and pain in everyone you meet and wondering if they’re missing someone, too. It’s finding beautiful boys you don’t want to love. (But that you want to want to love.)

It’s seeing his face or hearing his name and drifting off to the place between dreaming and reality also known as memory. You know what it is. It’s the way he looked at you when you confused him and the way he looked at you when you laughed. It’s the way he reached out for you at seven am, eyes still heavy with sleep, and pulled you closer. It’s the moments where you knew he was broken, when he was humble enough to let you in. It’s the moments where you held each other close and wiped the other’s tears. Your arms and legs grow heavy and you don’t know if you can bear it another second so you come back. Back to the empty bed or the lecture hall. Back to the shopping cart or the traffic light. Back to the conversation with a friend who can’t decide who to sleep with that night. (It’s a rather big deal.)

It’s staring at the phone not in anticipation but in dilemma. It’s making coffee for one and oddly hoping he’s doing the same at that exact moment. It’s when the sky’s a little duller, night’s a little longer, and jokes are not as funny as they once were. It’s being surrounded by your best friends and family, in a room full of laughter, and feeling slightly off. It’s looking at that sea of faces and one is missing. It is being trapped inside the universe where you once existed as one, and not two. It is holding out hope that he is the end game. It is being out of touch with reality. And the worst part of all is that you don’t know if you want it to end.