when your heart hurts

Everyone has felt this way before. If you haven’t, you don’t have a real heart; you’re the Tinman in the Wizard of Oz.  It’s the only way you know you have a heart; you know – when your heart breaks.

It starts out hurting real bad. It’s a piercing cut that cannot stop bleeding. Of course it doesn’t really spurt blood that coats everything in red. Rather, it’s a bleeding of emotions that you can never control. At one moment, you’re angry; at other times, you laugh at yourself for being a silly person, sacrificing so much for one person; most times, you would be moping around, not knowing how you really should be feeling. Your emotions turn worlds upside down; not just your, everyone’s.

After a while, as with all bleeding, the bleeding sputters out and eventually it stops. This is when the heartaches start to happen. It’s not exactly a scorching pain; neither is it a dull trauma. It feels more like your heart had been soaking in a pit of vinegar and now it’s just been taken out for it to breathe on the kitchen top. The feeling never really goes away; it’s more a sourness that ebbs. Like a needle prick, your heart experiences stings, especially when you least expect it. The rest of the time, the sourness merely seeps your energy away slowly like a long slow jog. It is a jog that never really tires you out, but you know you really want to stop running. Though you might look all right on the outside, your insides continue to soak in the remnants of the vinegar. Nothing washes away the vinegar, so it continues to eat away at the sinews of your pumping muscle. Of course, it never really destroys anything physically about your heart. It merely eats away at the motivation of your heart. That, most people might agree could be so much more destructive.

Any tears left on the heart will heal; as everyone says, time heals. However, what they never really tell you is that the healing hurts as much as the tearing. Scabs start to form over all the wounds; scabs that pull the heart in different ways. Any callous movements cause the scabs to open once again. As the scabs heal they itch. You know you shouldn’t scratch, but still you do. As with the roller-coaster of emotions, the scabs drive you further crazier than the healing process should.

When does it finally end? It could be never; but when it does, you would definitely know. It might feel like someone had finally realised that the vinegar has to be washed away and dumps a bucketful of ice water in an attempt to get rid of every last molecule. 

Sometimes, the washing works and the heart finds another motivation to pump again. Others might not be so fortunate; the vinegar might never truly be removed. It remains in some crevices, continuing to sting, continuing to destroy. Let’s hope we are fortunate. 

A Song of the Heart

A drop appeared on the windscreen, then, another drop, and another drop. The drops appeared more and more quickly and clustered nearer and nearer each other. The whole windscreen slowly filled up with one drop after another; the scene outside slowly blurred out of focus. Maybe it was the raindrops, maybe it was the tears that had gradually flowed out in the last five or so minutes.

It was not the first time his heart was broken. It had happened countless times before, but with age playing catch up, the last few heart breaks had been considerably harder and harder to handle. Even when logic had dictated that it might have been for the best that things have ended. The pain never really gets any easier to handle. The heart was not an organ soothed by logic. The heart strings that played the melody of our emotions were never going to be appeased by the cold, heartless emotionless logic.

The rain had become a steady waterfall silencing the outside world. You couldn’t hear the nearby cars whizz by in the rain. You couldn’t hear the engine of the car a few lots away. You couldn’t hear the sobs that had slowly become louder and louder. All you could hear was the gentle pitter-patter of the raindrops that fell onto the metallic roof of the car. It was a soothing rhythm that followed the rhythm of the broken heart. Perhaps that was why the rain was soothing. It played a song the heart could understand. Perhaps it was fortunate that it was the rainy season.

As suddenly as the rain had fallen, the rain had abated. The next raindrop took longer and longer to fall. Eventually, there was no more rhythm. The remaining raindrops gathered in large drops and streaked across the windscreen, leaving clear cracks in the veil that had once prevented outsiders from seeing into the car. With more and more cracks forming on the veil, the crying automatically ceased. Tears were hurriedly rubbed away. Tissues were hastily chucked onto the floor. A quick last blow of the nose as the tropical sun broke its rays through the dissipating dark clouds. Society did not want to see a crying broken man.

The window was rolled down to allow fresh air to flow into the car. The last remnants of the rain fell with a pompous aplomb, hitting the roof of the car defiantly, denying the end of the shower. The fresh smell of nature wafted into his nose, pushing out the stench the tears had left behind. Even though the weather had turned for the better, the emotions inside were still the same. There was still a darkness that hovered about. With the moving on of the rain, the man had to leave too. There was nothing left here for him. He would have to wait till the next opportunity when his heart strings could be soothed by the rainy symphony.