My friend Alicia told me I had a rubber heart.
Another relationship had ended/failed/sputtered out in a mad flurry of imagined slights, nasty recriminations and, ultimately, a long period of limbo that turned out to be the worst part of it all. Shame on me for not seeing the truth sooner. Shame on her for being such a shitty asshole of a human being.
Anyway.
Rubber heart. Because it bounces back.
Heartbreak heals, you know? Time does its thing, daily life takes your focus and you concentrate real hard on a few things to keep the fury and hurt at bay long enough to dissipate into nothing, just shaded memories and a peculiar nostalgia for a person that definitely ain’t the person in real life.
I’ve been in love — heavy, deep love — more than once. That heavy love is crushing when it doesn’t work out. Suffocating, insufferable…it’s driven me to the brink of suicide once or twice. It’s kept a boiling acid rage in my guts, an endless craving to deliver some kind of comeuppance or to receive an odd sort of validation.
It’s also the greatest thing ever, when that heavy deep love is in full bloom. The world feels in balance. I’m buoyant and confident in posture. Feeling incredibly lucky to have found This Person, she could be IT.
But she’s not.
And suddenly you’re 48 and still out there, tentatively at first because the damage has taken a toll, your emotions wary of taking more abuse yet still filled with that same diehard romantic naïve optimism that keeps getting you into these relationships in the first place. You’re aware of your own red flags — not the depression and anxiety and recurring (if abstract) notions of killing yourself but the external ones, the lifelong bachelorhood & shit. Like something’s wrong with me…😎
Rubber Heart.
I’ve got some stories to tell…
