Always Listen To Your Heart. Except When It Lies.

Today is hard, for some reason.  Nothing I do distracts me from the brick of sadness that sits in my stomach, interfering with the important work of my diaphragm.  I keep catching myself taking deep, almost gasping breaths. Like that is going to change anything.

It’s a very first-world problem, I know.  I feel a little ridiculous about how distraught I (intermittently) am over this break-up. I still can’t sleep, or talk on the phone. I still can’t discuss it without crying (fair warning to those of you who know me in real life!) I’m still sucker-punched by random objects in my house: a blue dress I bought for a date, hanging empty in my closet.  A card he gave me for my birthday, slipped under a book. Yesterday, I was sideswiped by a new episode of This American Life that he would have just adored; I had to stop listening to it while I was driving because I was blinded by tears.

You lose a whole world when a relationship ends.  All of those things that only the two of you know, the little inside jokes and shared proclivities and pillow whispers that make up an entire secret landscape–gone.  And not only gone, but gone because someone willfully took it away. Loving people makes you so vulnerable to their capricious decisions and fickle desires.  It’s such an act of faith.

I was talking to a friend earlier about what a crappy day I’m having. I just don’t think I can do this again, I told him.  I don’t think I can risk another loss like this. 

But of course you can, he replied.  Survival is proof. It hurts, but the world isn’t ending. The risk is worth it.

Intellectually, I think he’s right.  Emotionally, I don’t know if I’m cut out for this. I feel like there is a finite number of times my heart can stand to be broken, and that number is not very high.  My other heartbreaks have been largely private affairs; I don’t like to let people know they’ve hurt my feelings, especially once they have proven their lack of trustworthiness by, you know, hurting my feelings. But Lieu…I showed him everything. I lavished him with as much care as his wary little heart could absorb, and then some. He knows what I was offering, and he knows who I am, and he made it plain that he doesn’t want any of it.  I don’t want to hurt you, he said.  But he did it anyway.

It was such a delight to find someone whose quirks and foibles I found endearing and fascinating instead of irritating. It was such a shock, after so long, to really feel it, in my belly and in my toes, and to feel it for someone who evinced some interest in me as well.  My heart was loud and insistent in declaring its preference for him from the minute he took my hand on our first date.  But, well, my heart was clearly wrong.  This wasn’t it. He’s not the one. I don’t believe in soul-mates anyway; I wouldn’t dare, because my god, the odds.  But I do believe that you only get so many chances, and what if he was my best chance at happiness, and he’s gone?  He made my heart stutter every time I saw him, right up until the end. But how can I listen to my heart any more, when that bitch clearly lies?

As one of my lovely commenters said, everything will be okay in the end, so if everything isn’t okay, this isn’t the end.  That isn’t true for me and Lieu–this is definitely the end, however much I might wish differently–but I hope it’s true for me and my life.  I just hope I wind up better than “okay.”