About Broken Hearts, Shattered Souls, and Looking At Your Reflection in Fractured Mirrors
Nothing prepares you for heartbreak. At least, nothing prepared me for mine; not the hundreds of romance novels I read where the heartbroken heroine ate ice cream in tubs, slept in the same clothes for days, and binge-watched The Notebook, before snapping out of the worst of it in two weeks.
Not even the haunting tunes of heartbreak ballads sung in falsettos and guttural voices belting lyrics written in the language of longing. Absolutely nothing prepared me for the first time of having someone yank my heart out of their chest.
It. Hurt.
Damn, it hurt.
It hurt more than I ever thought it could. I mean, getting your heart broken is emotional, but my chest physically hurt. If I did not already know that it was normal to feel that way, I might have shown up at the hospital. I hurt so much, for so long that I didn’t even know when it stopped.
But before all that pain, it was disbelief and I’m not surprised because heartbreak is grief. It’s you grieving for you and someone and all the things you’d never be again.
So, I went through the 5 stages.
Disbelief
It took me two days to make sense of the words that came out of his mouth the day he broke up with me. Of course, a part of my brain understood because he strung English words together to make sentences that had a meaning, but in my heart where I should’ve understood, I didn’t.
So, I wasn’t happy, and I wasn’t sad.
I was stunned.
For two whole days, I was stunned. This boy I loved, who said he loved me back, could not have said these words to me because when you love someone, and you don’t fight, cheat, or hit them, there’s no reason to want to exist outside of them.
So, why?
Surely, he couldn’t have meant those words. So, I braved every warning signal in my head and met with him to clarify how two people who loved each other in the way men and women loved each other could suddenly see themselves as siblings. I mean, siblings didn’t know how each other tasted, so how could I become your sister after four years of being your partner?
But you clarified how — in sentences patched from a dozen incomplete phrases because you didn’t know how to tell me that after four years, you were choosing to discard me; discard us. Your mind was made up and even though the signs were as neon bright as the fireworks in my heart the day you said you loved me, I denied it. I refused to believe that we could be over, so I mourned the death of a friend instead.
Anger
If you’ve never grieved a person before, you might think that the stages of grief happen linearly. Maybe one day, denial ends and then anger starts the next. But it doesn’t happen that way; at least it didn’t happen that way for me. Anger stole in like the end of the rainy season. Instead of an abrupt entrance, it came in staggered stages, until I transitioned fully from denial to anger.
I had angry questions and I wanted answers.
After everything we had been through? How could he? Hadn’t we fought against this unfair world, back to each other for too many years to just become strangers? And what was this about being friends or siblings? How could he ask me to stop weaving a world in the clouds where we lived happily ever after? Hadn’t we become each other’s safe harbor? How could he suddenly unanchor me and send me away into the uncertain rough seas of life?
I felt used.
It didn’t make sense.
I thought to myself that he must be mad. Bonkers. Flat outright insane.
I was so mad but like a summer rain, it quickly dissipated because when your heart is broken, anger is your mind’s way of postponing the inevitable breakdown.
My anger was so fierce that now when I look back, I truly wonder how I managed not to hate him then. Because I did hate him eventually. When you love someone so strongly that their scent gives you temporary arrhythmia, you need to hate them to move on.
Bargaining
No matter how logical a person you are, the bargaining stage of grief will humble you into an irrational mess. This stage is what I call the phantom pain of the mind. The limb (read as person) is no longer there, and you know it, in your head. But somehow, knowing that the person isn’t there doesn’t stop that ‘limb’ from hurting or itching. And since heartbreak is the grief of a living person, you actually try to get that limb (person) back.
For me, the five stages of grief can be put under two categories — disbelief and acceptance. Bargaining is the last stage of the former. You bargain for them because your mind doesn’t want to accept that they are gone.
You bargain because you think if you can fix it, break yourself a little more, love them harder, accept more flaws, accept less than you deserve, then this person whose existence is interwoven with yours will choose not to unravel you.
I thought that if I didn’t ask for more, I’d get it all. Maybe, I said to myself, if I could be more understanding, accepting these scraps of affection, then I could have my person back. And somehow, it both hurt and humiliated me that even for the low reward I was willing to accept, I still wasn’t palatable enough for this person to accept me back. But that did not stop me.
Did I bargain?
I did.
Am I ashamed now? I am.
If this is your first experience with heartbreak, I hope that you can avoid this stage. Because in retrospect you may not like who you become.
Depression
The depression stage of grief is that naughty boy in the class who never maintains his position in line and is more often than not, found in places he’s not supposed to be.
Depression doesn't always come fourth. Sometimes she’s there from the top, from disbelief.
For me, I felt depression from the first, and for the longest time, it was the only thing I felt, long after all the emotions before it had run their course. In some ways, I should be thankful because she was present for it all from disbelief to bargain, a constant voice in my head, she never let me be alone. But then again, depression and I share a very complicated relationship.
On the evening he unraveled us while we sat by the fire, swatting mosquitoes from our feet, I remember feeling depression’s warmth. It felt like a blanket on a hot day. She whispered ‘bitter somethings’ to me all night long, in a voice that was mine. She reminded me of the time when I was fifteen and loved my soul so much, I tried to free her from this ugly vessel and make her a butterfly.
She reminded me that I had reached too far, an “Oliver”, for something I did not deserve and would not deserve because I was everything that was wrong with the world, inside and out. She reminded me that “mother knows best” and I should have listened to her when she told me that no one would love me because boys did not love girls like me.
Depression sat with me for months and months and in that time, she taught me bad habits. She showed me how to eat and chase the food back up with the tail of my toothbrush. Hunched over a bucket with burning teary eyes from regurgitating my lunch, she would whisper to me to check the numbers on the scale for the tenth time since breakfast. And when the numbers were not two digits south of sixty, she put new lens on my eyes and asked me to look in the mirror then point out all the places on my body that needed fixing. And I did. I worshiped the scale; it was both my redemption and my cross. For months and months, depression and I had the same routine — wake up, measure, eat, regurgitate, measure, stare at the mirror, measure, have conversations about why I would never be good enough, and measure again.
And then, one night, after trying and failing to convince me that my soul needed to be a butterfly, she left, chased away by voices that didn't emanate from my head, voices that didn’t sound like me, saying to me that I was worthy to be here. And when she did, it was like the sun peeked out from behind the clouds at me, and I knew in that moment, that I would heal.
Acceptance
One day, acceptance comes, like a light bulb in a dark room. You can’t unsee it. When acceptance comes, it’ll feel like fresh grief because now you know truly that it’s over. Someone said that knowledge is pain. In this instance it is. But this pain is different because it is the start of the end. Like the sharp pain you feel when the hard pus of a boil comes out, this pain prefaces relief. You can now stop teeming in place, waiting at the station of a failed relationship for a bus on a one-way trip that will never come back.
Acceptance came for me weeks after the breakup, in a crowded arena of people and standing next to you, I felt alone. It would be the first time I felt alone in your presence. Ironically, you flipped the switch of acceptance in me. An offhand statement about knowing what to do but not being ready to do it triggered my epiphany. And as I walked home, away from you, fighting tears all the way, I knew what I had to do. I needed to cut you loose if I ever wanted to heal. And so I did.
I went home that day and made a playlist to drain my soul and I cried like I never had since the day you unlinked our souls. That was the day I accepted our paths will forever diverge.
Moving On
There are two quotes on grief that make me think quite a bit. One, grief is love that has nowhere to go. Two, grief is the final and continuous act of loving someone. They stick with me because no one talks about the last stage after acceptance — moving on. This is the stage where grief stops looming over you, an unwanted shadow of pain. Now, grief is your pal. You’ve finally accepted that he’s here for the long haul and you’re no longer scared of him. No, you’re friends with him now. He no longer reminds you of the painful longing of having and losing someone. Half the time, you don’t remember he’s there, blended as he is into the background of your life; until the sun hitting at an angle outlines him and you remember. You may cry heaving ugly tears when you do like I did two years after my friend died. Or you may smile with watery eyes at a kind memory. Either way, you’re moving on.
I think the same can be said of true love. You move on. Your heart no longer beats a staccato when you think of them.
Sometimes it smiles.
And sometimes, it sighs.
But it’s fine because you’re moving on.
