After The Breakup Comes The Mourning

There has undoubtedly been a death in my life, but this kind of death has no official certificate validating its truth. This death that I experienced has no immediate wake to view the remains one last time or a funeral to pay final respects. Instead, the last few months have been a commemoration of the life that once was in which I was the one affected. Sadly enough, I was the sole mourner of this death. So although there was no ceremony, flowers, or casseroles baked in honor of my sorrows, something near and dear to me has indeed passed away. And that something is us.

We are dead.

To compare heartbreak to a death is the most accurate comparison I could concoct. I cried like I was in mourning. I screamed like a part of me was missing. I ached like I lost a loved one. And in essence, isn’t that what happened?

When people whom we are closest to leave us, it’s as if a part of us goes with them. They steal a part of our hearts, which makes us broken. Hence the term “heartbreak.”

Many times during this painful journey I missed his inquisitive nature; the way everything was a puzzle to him that needed to be solved no matter the effort or time it would take in order to do so. I yearned to hear his overenthusiastic stutter that came out whenever he was excited to share something with a group of people.

I wished to watch him calculate things in his head, looking at equations with caution and determination to solve them.

And I missed his little quirks that made me fall even deeper in love with him, like the way he would talk out of the side of his mouth when he wasn’t happy about the words leaving his lips. Or the way he’d shrug his shoulders back when he put on a new shirt to make sure that it fell in all the right places.

But most of all, I missed what we used to be. I missed the life we had together. I missed us.

We had become a separate entity of life; the spirit of two souls acting as one, sharing a common bond for one another.

It was the memory of us that wouldn’t allow me to sleep at night. It was the remnants of mental images of us that caused me so many tears. It was the thought of us together that made this pain so excruciating.

We lurked in every corner of my life; frames on my dresser, songs on my phone, words in my mind. My life was consumed by us.

You-and-I was a beautiful thing.

But now it’s over and I am forced to mourn over the person that we were together because who and what it was is dead and gone.

One of the hardest parts about heartbreak is having no one to talk to about it. Unless you’re one of the lucky ones who is able to catch a friend or someone close to you at the tail end of a broken heart, chances are that most people aren’t going to have a clue as to what to say to you. There really isn’t much that can be said to someone in mourning.

But right now, I would just like to apologize on behalf of all of the people who want you to get over it. I am sorry that these people cannot see that the healing of a broken heart does not happen overnight, or even in a few months. A broken heart can remain broken for a very long time and many people do not understand this.

It comes from a good place usually. The people near and dear to you hate seeing you as a lesser version of yourself. You may be unrecognizable to them and it gives them so much hurt to see you like this. So naturally, they want you to get better as soon as possible.

But sometimes it comes from a selfish place. They are tired of hearing their name. They are frustrated because they have listened to you vent about him/her for months. They are over it. But you are not.

So please don’t listen to the people who want to speed up your mourning process. Do not feel guilty because of the pain you feel. They were not there at three in the morning when you laid your head on his chest and blissfully listened to him whisper “I love you” in your ear. They didn’t see the way his face lit up after you pulled away from that first kiss. They did not witness all of the small, perfect moments that defined your love for each other. They simply don’t know, so they will not understand why you’re not over it.

Take all of the time you need to grieve. There is no limit on the amount of time you can spend mourning a relationship. Mourn until you feel okay, because if you don’t, all of these emotions will be repressed. And repression is a dangerous thing.

I am still in mourning. I am mourning us, and that is going to take a long time to recover from. Us was a big deal to me. Us was everything to me. And my heartbreak will not be silenced because of the people who are selfish or impatient. They may know what it’s like to be overcome with grief, but they will never understand what it’s like to mourn us.