This Is How A Heart Breaks

This is how a heart breaks.

It’s a collection of moments, red flags, and near-misses. Flashing lights and warning signs of the rugged and unsteady but wildly euphoric road ahead. Lights blinding you with their truth, but you shut your eyes so tight and willed them away.

This is how a heart shatters.

Premonitions and writing on the wall, heavily disguised, you didn’t see a thing. No brushing it off, excusing it away. They were incognito; you couldn’t find them even if you took a flashlight and searched every nook, every dark, hidden expanse.

This is how a heart falls to pieces.

It’s in the way they make promises to you, promises they never intended to keep. And the way they look at you like you hung the stars in the sky, but they change their mind; they prefer the moon instead.

You said forever, but it was all just a sham. I am walking around with a gaping wound in the shape of you, and you’re still out there living, breathing, feeling every moment without me. You don’t even know it, but you’re walking around living your life with pieces of me embedded in you, pieces I will never get back.

This is how a heart is destroyed.

It’s in the way you see the make and model of the truck they owned, the one they bought when you were together. You see their face in your dreams, so vivid that it tricks your mind. You wake up, and you’re still alone. How many days, months, years has it been without them?

You don’t measure love in time. You measure love in the way they stirred your spirit and made you feel alive. It’s in the way you think of life as ‘before they crashed into me’ and ‘after they abandoned me.’

A heart breaks like this: a hairline fracture here, a small bruise imprinted by their smile over there. The color of their eyes delivers another blow. The way their hand feels tangled with yours, the ringing in your ears to the tune of their voice saying, ‘I love you’ – the cracks widen, deepen, grow.

Heartbreak is a collection of damages, security deposit notwithstanding.