How You Heal A Broken Heart

One tight slap to the people who say, eat ice cream to deal with a broken heart. It doesn’t work; in fact, nothing does. No matter how many tubs you finish, with every bite, you still have that hollow, glum feeling inside. And no, it doesn’t get better with progressive bites. I think it just gets worse and worse. That sweet iciness inside your mouth with that sinking pain in your chest. No, I disagree. It’s hardly a cure — not even a death by chocolate flavor. It just adds to your guilt, and dread of how that ice cream is going straight to your waist. Definitely not a cure.

So what is, if not ice cream?  Is it insanely impossible amounts of alcohol consumed on nights with friends? When your friends foolishly pray that you’ll forget about your lover right after you’re done calling them names on the first toast of the night and then they spend the rest of the night trying to hook you up with random strangers at a bar. But all you do the whole night is cry and call and text your lover all night. The sight of you — beyond miserable.

So, how DO you deal with a broken heart? Retail therapy? But how many pretty things are you going to buy? Money doesn’t really fall from the skies, darling; damn, even if it did, it hardly rains anymore. So, we’d be broke anyway. And how many bags and shoes is it really going to take to forget about them — your ex-lover?

How about a rebound? But how does that even work? How exactly do you even plan on being with someone else, even if for a short while, if they’re all that you think about, still? No matter whom you meet, you have their shape in your mind to measure against. You just end up looking for an exact copy of them to replace them only. Guess what? Doesn’t exist.

A hobby then? Taking out hours to do or learn something that you didn’t do earlier, so essentially that leaves your mind without a leash. It’s free to wander and guess what it chooses? Good guess, yes, your lover. So, without the usual amount of time that you spent grieving over the demise of your relationship, with the convenience of your daily routine of course, your mind now gets extra freedom to ponder over what went wrong, and how things changed, analyzing the unbearable contrast between how they were around you earlier as opposed to how things got between you two by the end of the affair, how their replies to your pet texts changed over time, how they just ceased to care anymore and just how convenient it was for them to replace you. Okay!! Stop!! Stop the train of thoughts!! This is like torturing yourself! No cooking or painting! I mean you can’t even listen to songs anymore because your entire playlist is like a montage of memory after memory, all piercingly sweet memories, which now when recalled, feel like a dagger right through your chest.

What then is the cure? Adopt a pet? So you can love the baby and cry too, because even every happiness in your life feels incomplete because you can no longer share it with them. So you can now share your gloom and loneliness with a cute little pup or kitten, and rid their childhood of all the happiness that they truly deserve? Not a smart plan really.

Holiday then? A change of scene may actually work it’s magic. Provided, you don’t go to the mountains and spend all your time there thinking about the last holiday you took, which was of course with them. And I hope you don’t keep thinking the whole time that you’d actually rather be with them instead. Yeah… Good luck with that.

Essentially, there isn’t really a “cure” to a heartbreak. You’ve no other option other than to just suck it up. And deal with it. Face it. Your heart is going to hurt. Like hell. I swear it’s going to be worse than hell. There’s no other way around it. That’s the only way through. It’ll be as gloomy as those rains. You know the kind that just feels like it will go on forever? The non stop pouring, without a trace of wind or thunder? Like the skies are silently crying these bucket loads of rain. Yeah, it’ll be as depressing as those rains, in fact, actually it’ll just be worse. You will feel dented beyond repair, and yes, it’ll actually be that way. Because you won’t heal. You never do. You just …you know learn to live without them.

You just get used to it after a while. After a considerable amount of time, one day you’ll be thinking that, oh I thought of them just four times today, as opposed to the forty five thousand and thirty six times that you did earlier. But getting to that day is the challenge. There will be times that you’ll be sitting in a crowd and not be there at all. There will be times that thinking about them would have you teary eyed. You’ll constantly breathe their name. You’ll mourn their absence from your life as their absence from the world. You’ll think about your favorite memories of them and cry yourself to sleep. You’ll wake up in the morning with puffy eyes and not one drop of will to get out of bed and get on with your life. But you’ll have to do it anyway. There will be days when you feel that’s it, they’ve actually caused the end of you. Because they didn’t just leave, they took too much away from you. You’ll sleep in their t-shirt with the hope to cling on to every last piece of them left with you, except there isn’t anything left it’s just a mirage of them lingering right next to you to tease you, to play with your head. And funnily enough, that mirage has been created by you. You know they aren’t really there, but you still try to cling on to them, you reach out and try to touch them, only to come back empty handed. Every damn time.

All you can do is wait. For that day when it gets better. Gets bearable.

It’s important to get out on time. Better to admit defeat. Better to watch the screen flash game over, because, it’s about time you realize that it isn’t even a game anymore. So you’ve got to stop playing.