When You Have A Broken Heart

By

When you have a broken heart, you’ll forget who you are. You’ll lose yourself in the hurt of all the gruesome shards that are stabbing against your lungs and stomach; you’ll be consumed by the sickly feeling you get each time you move and the cuts sting and widen deeper. You’ll cry and beg, and wish you were a different person, a more loveable person, anyone but you. You’ll become obsessed with pitying yourself, intoxicated by this pathetic self-centeredness.

You’ll lie in bed all day and sob. Every little thing will cause your eyes to water. The way the light falls across the empty pillow next to you, the tiny specks of dust circling your face, the pile of clothes that lies limply by your side, discarded in drunken desperation the night before. You’ll force yourself up to drag on a cigarette and with each breath you draw, another tear, another reminder of all the things he did that tore you limb from limb until you were left this awful, crying, smoking shell.

When you have a broken heart, everything becomes a remnant. You’ll look down at your hands and disbelief will slap you in the face as you imagine that they once intertwined with another person’s. That sweater you wore the night you ran three blocks to kiss him for the first time (you’ll never wear it again), the show you used to watch together (you’ll never watch it again), the juice in the fridge you drank when you were both so hung over — every tiny little thing in your environment will be imbibed with a jealous history that haunts you from all the little corners you never even knew existed.

One minute you’re Superman, the next you’re sh-tting kryptonite and you’re weak and sore. You thought maybe you’d found someone special only to realize that they never thought the same of you. The revelation disenfranchises you, numbs you, you’re defeated. Everything you hoped and dreamed for is dashed, but worse, all the laughs and morning sex and him looking into your eyes was just a fat lie, a big joke, and you can’t help but feel an enveloping sense of hopelessness. You want to believe that everything happens for a reason, but you get to thinking that everything happens because you’re useless.

When you have a broken heart, you won’t know how to put it back together. You’ll be screaming inside everywhere you go, and while you’re smiling at all the people around you, telling them you’re over this and that, and you definitely think that guy across the bar and a cutie and you’re going to give him your number — inside, it’s all aflame. You’ll find yourself in someone else’s bed eventually, thinking this is the way to fix it, but as you hobble down the street to take the train home in the morning, you’ll feel more broken hearted than ever.

When you have a broken heart, you’ll overlook the fact that your heart’s been broken, and more importantly, unbroken, before. You won’t remember that you’re a Wolverine; that you will heal in time by doing almost nothing. You’ll be oblivious to the fact that love has come and gone in your life because you’re blinded by your current pain, just like every pain before had blinded you, made you completely self indulgent. When you have a broken heart, even if you don’t know it, bloody sinews are reaching out for one another, somewhere inside your pounding chest, they’re intertwining, fusing slowly, meticulously; you are being put back together every day, and you barely even know it.

You should follow Thought Catalog on Twitter here.