While I'm gone, everything's gonna be alright

It was one of the books by Lucy Maude Montgomery in which Anne of Green Gables met a woman, I forget her name, who she found terribly romantic because she lived in a lovely house in the woods alone, nursing a broken heart.  And the woman told her that a broken heart wasn't nearly the excruciating unbearable thing that most poets described it as, but rather, more like a toothache, dull and nagging.  Worse when you think about it.  Always bearing down on you but allowing you to survive the days, allowing you to function.  Just always hurting, never giving you relief from pain.  Sometimes I think about the things that I feel have broken my heart - and the time I had a toothache - and agree in some ways that this is true.  Except the toothache grew progressively worse and the broken heart does not.  Thank goodness.

Some say broken hearts get better with time.  I'm not sure mine has, really.  I've continued to cry every day (which may be a good thing, this steady release) but have also continued to function.  To go to work, to talk to friends, even still enjoy the things that are meant to be enjoyed.  For more than a year.

And so maybe what I have isn't a broken heart.  

Except that it is.  

Broken heart means something different than I thought it did.  I thought it meant never being able to be happy again, or never able to love or to feel good inside.  And that's not what it is.  It doesn't mean life is bad.  It means you never quite completely forget the Sad.  And maybe it means you appreciate the good things even more with a newly acquired sense of how fleeting they may be.

It doesn't make one a better person.  If I could reverse it I would do so without hesitating.  I'd give up everything.  

So what is it, exactly?  I'm not quite sure, except that I feel like I understand it more than I ever have in the past. 

A smart woman once talked to me about the compartmentalization of emotions, how a person can trap feelings in small sections so they don't permeate other parts of the psyche.  This keeps you safe, and it keeps you numb.  And when she said this I knew exactly what she meant because I could remember so many times in my life when my eyes were crying but my brain was thinking about something else, as though the two were completely disconnected.  I was writing grocery lists and tears would hit the paper.  "Lettuce" (drip), "olive oil" (drip), "crouton" (sniffle drip drop).

And this particular broken heart was some kind of destroyer that ripped out all the barriers between compartments and suddenly every feeling that had been neatly stored in tupperware broke free and became Real.  I could feel them all.  And then I couldn't write grocery lists anymore because I was curled up in a ball crying all the time, and my god it hurt.

So maybe for me a broken heart is more about broken barriers between my heart and my brain, my feelings and my thoughts, a free flow from one to the other.  Which is painful when it's new, or maybe everyone else finds it painful too, new or old.  Sometimes it's sharp; that's when I start the crying again.  But lots of the time it's not sharp.  It's a dull heavy thing that you grow weary of carrying but can't put down -but you grow so accustomed to it you almost forget it's there.  And then it lets you be normal for awhile.  

Maybe every one of us has a broken heart and maybe I'm just waking up to what's been going on around me all my life.  It isn't anything to do with becoming pessimistic, it's not.  If anything, it makes you gentler inside when you realise everyone else is hurting too.  Makes you handle people with a little more care.  

Carrying heavy things is supposed to make you stronger.

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