The Stages of a Heartbreak

The phases of loss are always the same… but what about those of heartbreak? From the moment you fall in love, through the disappointment and breakup it seems that the pattern is familiar. Or so psychology says… But does it depend on the relationship and the partner? What will the knock on effects of a broken heart be in our subsequent romances? Are we the same after a breakup? Do we owe the success of our new love life to our exes? 

I found you when I didn’t even think to look for you, but there you were. You entered me like the sunrise light, flooding sleepy spaces. You were huge and you made me huge. Everything else was mitigated; plunged into a deep sleep. I loved you by day and I loved you by night. I blew on the floor and scared away all the shadows. Both yours and mine. I opened wide the windows of my soul so that you could enter fully and imbue yourself with me. A flock of ruffled birds penetrated my skin and I felt turmoil and warmth; something as encouraging as it was disturbing, disconcerting and seductive. And out the wind was blowing, and the nights were falling, but not you and I.

There was love overflowing and overwhelming; there was light and there was darkness. You loved me, but not all of me. Yet I loved you whole, blind and unabashed. Fumbling, I guessed your shapes in the darkest nights; in the longest days pocked with absences and other presences that, like ghosts, appeared and disappeared from my horizon, where before it was always spring. And now you approach me, you flatterer, and adorn me with your garlands of paper flowers, of roses and cut daisies, as if paying tribute to a dead woman whose heart still throbs. I still don’t see you, although now I’ve also stopped feeling your breath next to mine. Where are you my love? And I continued night after night dedicating my kisses to you, but you were gone. How heartbreaking it is to keep feeling you without you feeling me. Crying for absences, my soul is falling to pieces.

And you come back sometimes, like a flash, giving wings to vain hopes. In tears, dense as tar, time is slipping away yearning for what I never had, but I thought I did. Hungry love hurts, broken hugs hurt, empty nights hurt, and the pungent taste of lying hurts. And yet I keep my desire for you, wrapped in those same gauze handkerchiefs that dry my tears; and I smile, but I do not recognize myself, because it is not of joy but a broken doll’s grimace.

I feel the thread of betrayal in my chest, in my back, in all of me. Aggrieved dignity stings; deaf words resound within my head, like echoes lost in time. A pain without regret. An open wound that’s barely bleeding. They are my arrow wings that mark the passage of a time that I will leave behind, of a path that I will not travel again. Not with you.

Today I have opened my eyes and faced the day. I feel the precious percussion of my heartbeat marking my way from a new journey to who knows where. I look at myself in the mirror and full me up with myself, with the beauty of my reconstruction, with all its broken pieces and spare parts. I’m standing today and I’m not the same as I was yesterday. To rebuild is to be reborn from pain, to rise from the remains of a shipwreck and not stop swimming until reaching the surface to soak up the light and fill my heart again with fresh air. Today I am infinite.