Heartbreak is literal. You have no way of coping with the scars of this trauma. Blood pumps slowly through your veins, never really reaching all your extremities. Your limbs feel distant, detached, as though they've been sliced from the rest of you. Your vision doubles mirages of your past. Your empty stomach wants to vomit. Your chest becomes a war zone, you can feel each beat,

slower than the one before,

fighting to be the last.

The moment you met them your heart might have stopped.

Skipped a beat maybe.

Fluttered a little. But in the aftermath, the butterflies within you have seared off wings.

In the desolation, the destruction, the erosion of your body, you enter into a state of awakened sleep paralysis. Struggling to wake up from the truth in your nightmares, screaming for assistance with no vocal cords. 

You have had a heart attack. Your heart has slowed to an impossible rate. You, like a possum playing dead, are stiff and unaffected. It’s an incurable disease spreading to every crevasse within your body. Your heart is broken, it stops beating.

But your body refuses to give up,

your mind refuses to die,

your blood creates bridges between pieces of your combusted heart.

And you begin to heal. 

From the inside of his heart bared the weight of a broken and fragile boy...crippled by the chains locked around his wrists and ankles...each chain link...forged by his hardships and downfalls that seemed to penetrate right through his innocence. To redeem him from such an obscure place...would be suicide. Yet, she managed to crawl through the field filled with glass shard pieces made from his tears and finally...broke those chains to set him free.

I will taste the orchestra of your breath

and drink the dripping melody

that rings within your vision as

I hang my future from your lashes.

with a tinge of pain we'll smile

from the deep. my head sunk

into your chest, counting tides

and dreaming to the heavy ticks

of relevance, imagining

I can stay here in the warmth

until we die within

this beautiful comfort.

The window breaks. You watch as glass flies everywhere, blanketing the ground with glittering shards. At first you feel nothing. The window is gone but the difference is not yet clear. You see out into the world through the gap just as you always did. Then the glass bites at your arms as it flies, leaving marks on your skin, blood dripping to the floor. Then you feel the cold. Wind blows through the gaping hole and you shiver at its caress. You stand there, goosebumps rising on your flesh, for a short eternity before you finally move searching for a sweater. After twenty minutes of searching you finally find one at the bottom of your closet and as you shrug into it the rough wool scrapes against the wounds left by the window's destruction. You try to remember the last time you wore a sweater, already missing the silent protection the window offered without you even noticing. Sweater in place, you search for something to fill the gap. Eventually, you find a plastic sheet and tape it into place over the hole. Sweeping the shards to the side, you turn away from the carnage and go to bed. 

You wake the next morning and re-enter the kitchen. Habit takes over and as the coffee pot begins to heat you grab your sponge and turn to pull back the drapes before it comes back to you. You remember what happened and your hand falls, coming to rest on the marks on your arm. After a moment you sigh, wrapping a blanket around your shoulders and turning back to your coffee.

As the weeks move on the wounds on your arms heal. You get used to wearing a sweater around the house. Eventually, you replace the window. But the new window is of a different style, more plain looking and sturdy than the previous one.  You still find glass from time to time in the carpet and for a moment it takes you back and you find yourself lost in that night again. As you become comfortable with the new window you wear sweaters around the house less and less but you never let them become buried quite so deep again. The window becomes part of your past but the scars will always remain.

There is no one word, of any phrase, in any language, that can describe the way it truly feels to be heartbroken. The feeling of heartbreak transcends human thought. You feel it surge through you in waves - as if you were a black, tar road in the midst of a desert heatwave. It's an ache that pulses through every layer of your being - first, as a numbing coldness that trickles across your skin... then, as a crippling tightness that travels through your muscles and stops your heart, and again, it strikes; as it frictions through your bones. It doesn't stop there - to be heartbroken is more than physical. Heartbreak happens in your body, your mind, and your soul. It's a darkness that infects you, and consumes you, after beating you down to the point where you can no longer stand. It's a sting in your chest - and a magnetic pull in your soul, towards someone or something that can never have you; one that earthly and physical barriers prevent from ever being satisfied.

There is no such thing as heartbreak. For to be broken by someone that you love, or who once promised to love you, is to have every fiber of your being put in limbo - neither alive, nor dead... just floating, unaware, unfulfilled, and purposeless until you are either swallowed by your demons, or rise again to feel warmth and love. Some people float forever, some for a while, and some never do realize that they are still numbly in between happiness and depression...

As a woman I have known many heartbreaks; here are a few.

When you are a young and pretty girl with beautiful long blond hair and blue eyes. You have friends, at least you thought you did.  Along comes some boy and your friends suddenly hate you.  You did nothing and yet you are found guilty.  You learn that other females are not your friend.  Crack!

When you get a little older you think you will trust someone outside family.  You fall in very deep teenage love with a wonderful young man but are forbidden because of age to see each other.  He now despises you and ignores you.  You still love him.  He dies in a terrible car crash.  You run out into the rain screaming and your heart burns, it hurts. 

You decide never to love again.  But you grow lonely.  Crash!

You are older now and once again trust someone.  On again, off again relationship full of passion, regrets, anger, joy and bliss ensues.  Both are so bad yet so good for each other. Slowly both feel that this is hate, not love but neither can be whole without the other. Marriage comes, followed quickly by painful divorce because neither were ready. 

You will always love each other but can never be together; destruction comes from your union and devastates everything in its path.  You learn to hate men and distrust them all.

Crumble!

The pain of loneliness and sting of failure drive you once again into the arms of a man. You both know this is not love but lust.  You need to forget and so does he.  It quickly ends when you are left pregnant and alone.  But this is a good thing in the end, you think.  You will finally have something, someone, who will love you unconditionally the rest of your life.  You need no one else because of this small person who is part of you.

Time goes on and the child is born and it is the most joyous moment in your whole existence.  A man child, ironic, but wonderful.  He grows, he looks just like his Mama, you are glad of that. Smash!  

It becomes apparent there is something not quite right.  You take him to all the specialists, doctors and therapists you can find.  Diagnosis, autism.  So now you have a child who mostly cannot tell you how he feels, etc.  Your heart breaks, not for yourself, but for him...your mother's heart breaks...it Shatters...        

Some losses are not real losses. Like being in love with the wrong guy, and finding the right guy later.

Someone steals your POS car and you get a better one. You may feel hurt at the time, but it's not as bad as you thought.

There are times when you are not a biological parent but you love the child as much as you love your own birthed from your body. I have a step daughter from a previous relationship, I raised her from 2yrs to 6yrs old. Her dad and I split then and it was only because of her mother that her brothers and I were allowed to see her. The down side to that was that if I didn't jump through hoops for her mother, or if my daughter didn't do something, anything, sneezed wrong, she wouldn't get to come to see us. There are times when out of love we have to show great courage to do what's best for your child. It is so painful to have to give up a child to someone else who may be able to handle him being out of control. The guilt, the loss, the complete failure and heartbreak I felt as his mother. His mother, the one who kisses all the hurts away, the one who hugs him tight. I'm the one to make it alright. I could not this time. He took a kitchen knife to my youngest a throat. His behavior was just too much out of control and now I couldn't even keep my youngest safe. I HAD TO LOVE HIM ENOUGH TO GET HIM HELP.

It was heartache and loss just the same.

To this very day I hate that I had to do it, what else could I do? Nothing.

So you see I have known nothing else in my life but heartache. It hurts like nothing you will ever feel in your entire life. You must understand that LOVE always has a price, your heart or your Soul, sometimes your heart and Soul.

Imagine doing division. 

You have get the lowest possible number, the lowest possible point, to get the right number. Divide 2 by 2. This is your heart. Your heart is the two pieces. What makes this two pieces? I'll tell you. 

Your heart and soul are one times one... Which makes two. 

Now imagine. The person you love more than this world coming into your life, changing you forever, you'd never imagine something so beautiful-- so marvelous-- so glorious! The magnificent love, friendship, happiness, intimacy; it's more than you can explain. Words cannot explain the way your soul longs for this One. You've shared smiles, laughter, tears, anger, and even your body. You've told this person your deepest darkest secrets and you have no regrets in doing so. 

And then...

*snap* 

This person. Dies. Leaves you alone. Beats you. Leaves you to drown. Uses you. But... wasn't this the person that loved you? There are so many unanswered questions... how, why, when, what? I don't understand; how did this happen? Why did this happen? Wasn't it supposed to be... forever?

Keep dividing. 

Eventually, in time, your two became-- One. 

That is what your heart does. When it is broken.