Heartbreak and Afterwards

When you’ve had your heart broken…Well, at first, you look at it and question whether or not it’s really worth all the effort. You examine the remains of all that was you and gaze at the torn edges wondering if you could even begin to find how it all fit together in the first place.

After a while, you look around and see that others have done it. Inexplicably, these people have had their hearts torn apart but have somehow cobbled them back together. How did they do that?

So you gather a few pieces and compare the edges. Tears gather in your eyes as you view the complexity of it all. You knew your heart when it was whole, but somehow its completed shape, which you had taken for granted, escapes you. Even so, if you were somehow able to get it back together somehow, why would you ever put yourself in a place where it could so easily be shattered again?

But eventually, the pieces start to come together. Bit by bit it starts to take shape once more. You show it to others in an effort to see if they can give you a hint of how it’s supposed to look. Sometimes they give you hints and even offer to help. Sometimes they swat it away and now the pieces that once fit together don’t seem to fit anymore. You begin to understand why some artists never share their work until it’s been completed.

At some point, you’ve put together most of the pieces and something resembling a heart has taken shape. You shake your head at it because it’s nothing like what you remember. Somehow the lines are more jagged and the color from one piece to the next doesn’t match quite right. But it fits. At least you think it does. You feel better for the most part. So you start showing your heart again to other people.

Once, in what seems like ages ago, this was a simple thing. But now, as you hold your heart out, you are now acutely aware of the claws, sandpaper and thorns that some people have on their hands. You recoil, wondering how you had missed that before. Everyone has them, it seems. In horror, you hold your reassembled heart tightly to yourself. As you glance at the now sharpened world wondering how you could ever consider sharing it with anyone ever again.

You hear a soft crack and your eyes go wide. You look down and discover that your heart was beginning to break again. You loosen your grip and examine it. Small tears in the seams and cracks in the new exterior appear to you. As you struggle to understand how it happened, you look at your own hands. You see it now and you don’t understand how you didn’t see it before. Your hands have small thorns…patches of sandpaper…and even claws.

That’s when you begin to understand.

How else pieces stay together without the holes for the screws to hold everything together? How else could the rough exterior have been smoothed unless you had the sandpaper to do so? These imperfections are tools that you used to reassemble your heart. They aren’t so horrifying to you anymore as you accept that they are as much a part of you as your heart — indeed, they ensure that you can repair your heart when it needs it.

Now you rise and look upon the others and see that they are just as flawed as you are. They’re also doing the best that they can with their own tools. Many don’t know they exist, but some do. Some do use them to hurt other people, but others use them to comfort and console those that cannot do it for themselves.

I want to be one of those people.

I can be one of those people.

Let me show you.