When Your Head Knows, But Your Heart Is Still Learning

My head knows, but my heart is still learning.

I will never understand how they both live within me, how they are both me, but how they so rarely see eye to eye.

Everyone tells me I’m better off now, and my head says yes. Yes, I am. Yes, this is for the best. Yes, it is good that you left. That was too many tears, too much sadness, too much, too much for one girl to take.

But my heart stomps its foot and shakes the rafters and rages. It rages. It says no, there is no way I’m better off, how can anyone be better off when they have a crater in their chest. How can anyone be better off when they can’t breathe right anymore, when their lungs don’t inflate right when they’re in pieces on the floor, and everyone has to step over them, because they’re not going anywhere, they’re not going anywhere.

I’m not going anywhere, my heart says, and it is stubborn. It is fixed now, and I’m so proud of how it’s fixed now, but my stubborn heart sealed its cracks with you still inside of it. My head pulls and pulls at the pieces of you, trying to yank you out, trying to free you, trying to free me, but my heart clings tight.

My heart misses you, you know. And when it’s quiet enough, when it’s dark enough, when a memory or two slips free of the room in the back of my mind where I shove them, where they churn, where some fade but others shine – my head can’t help missing you, too.

But there is a difference between missing someone and wanting someone back, and my head never forgets that difference while my heart forgets all the time, all the time.

I am a conflict wrapped in skin, didn’t you know. A battle, a war. Head vs heart. Logic vs emotion. What I should want vs what I do want. Who I do want. Who I cannot stop wanting.

Tell me who won your war. Tell me who turned you in the direction of away. Was it your head? Your head, saying over and over again, this will never work, this will never work. Me over here and you over there, this will never work, this will never work.

Or was it your heart, tell me it wasn’t your heart, tell me your heart didn’t decide. Tell me your heart didn’t stop pulling, didn’t stop wishing, hasn’t stopped missing me. Hasn’t stopped wanting me. Hasn’t stopped fighting.

Tell me, tell me, that half of you went to war for me.

There’s a white flag lying somewhere in the center of me, probably in my lungs, who so badly want to breathe, but I don’t know if either side will ever raise it. I don’t know if there will ever come a day when the bones of me do not quake beneath one whole half of me swearing that you’re for me and the other half insisting that you’re not.

But it’s quiet now, and it’s dark now, and both sides of me know that I miss you.

There’s something in that, a peace, a truce.

There’s something in how badly I miss you.