How would you describe heartbreak?

How would you describe heartbreak?

I don’t know

It feels like wanting to say I’m sorry all the time

It feels like someone is not there. It doesn’t feel like I’m here, just that they’re not.

I miss him when I’m happy. I miss him when I fall in love. That’s when it hurts the most.

Hurt? What is it exactly? I can’t stop there, I must keep going, trying to describe it. 

It feels like I haven’t slept in two months. Or maybe four. Or maybe a year.

It feels like I got a new boyfriend and then we fought because he said I wasn’t over you. And then I fell in love with him too, a little bit. I think. And when we broke up, I missed him but I missed you more. As if missing you was a luxury I couldn’t afford so I settled for missing him instead. Does that explain it? 

It feels like the messages I left on your phone that you never responded to.

And the ghost of you, turning me into a ghost too. Until I decided to give you my ghost heart. The only heart you deserved.

Falling asleep only when I felt like I understood you were wrong, that you hurt me a lot. Then making up thinking you realized that your dad hurt you too.

It feels like demanding that you stop lying to yourself about your dad. Until I learned that my mom was just as bad. And the two of us were like orphans, but worse. Because they hurt us. And you were the only person that understood what that felt like and saw me. Who saw that I couldn’t sit still because I walkways had to start a new project and find a new way to be loved. 

Except I could never make you love me. Not in the way that felt close, touchable.

So does it hurt? What a question.

I think I’m free now, because I wasn’t hurt when I didn’t have an identity or my own to feel the pain. And now I exist, and it all hurts. I look at the realness of my hands and the hard grotesque reality surrounding my skin, like the first blast of hospital air when a child is born. Do babies wish they could crawl back inside? Is that why they cry? Is that why I cry too little over you? Maybe five minutes the whole year. I’ve cried about everything else on earth except you