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.