"Notes on Surviving a Broken Heart"

You hate when people tell you that getting over your first love is the worst. You know what they mean: because it is your first love, the love that you will give anything to preserve and protect. And because it is all these things, all those overwhelming emotions that you have never felt before—you are not prepared for it. There is no way to prepare for the all-consuming need to inhale someone, as they become more necessary than oxygen. That soon all you can think of is the sound of their laugh. Curve of their jaw. Smell and taste of them. The foreign certainty that you would give them your everything.

 

People far wiser than you tell you this love, the first, is the most difficult to recover from. As if it were your second or third love it would be less painful, or you might make fewer mistakes, take fewer risks, dream fewer dreams. Of course it is your inexperience that led to the failure of your first, big love. Your naiveté. Your trust and belief that love truly exists—and it must, because you can feel it blossoming inside of you. How then can you not see the world full of so many possibilities? The radiant, fiery hope of a reality where you are—likewise—wanted, needed, cherished.

 

No.

 

Because this love is the first love, and because you are, supposedly, too trusting, it is doomed from its very conception. And if only you knew what you were doing, then maybe things would turn out differently. Maybe overcoming this first love wouldn’t hurt so badly.

 

You know they mean well when they give this advice. They see you broken—your little fluttering first love wings clipped as you hobble, flightless on the edge of loneliness. They see you achingly empty now that you know what it is to have love and to have lost it. They see you and they think their predictions of the elusive better one to follow will quiet the gnawing, biting absence that is rotting your insides. Making what was once firm, strong, and untouched by this first love soft, fragile, spoiled. How your heart once stretched swollen with love, and was then suddenly stopped. The tattered, too-thin membrane left behind sags, wanting again to be so full of the unknown and the mind shattering happiness that had swelled it to bursting before.

 

And you sort of wish that your heart had just burst. That it had just exploded straight out of your chest in a gory, smoking, bloody rocket so that the whole world could witness your pain at the loss of something so fleeting and intangible and permanent. How do you prove the existence of a feeling? Or its absence? How do you forget it once it’s gone? You wish you knew how to show people the rawness of your insides. The places scraped clean. They that find your pain unoriginal, ordinary, and—worse— predictable. You want to show them that maybe this happens to everyone, but right now, it is happening to you.

 

Overcoming your first big love is sort of like the dead squirrel you will jog past every morning the summer everything ends. Your house is on the corner of a curving road lined with massive trees. You can never really see where the road leads.

 

The day the squirrel dies is probably been a day like any other. It probably crossed the same road a thousand times before without incident. This last time it realizes too late that death is coming. In that frantic dash back to safety, it probably even thought that everything will be fine, that the world has righted itself again, safety at hand, a momentary high believing it has skirted death and won.

 

The impact: instant, fatal, and, after the crunching of bones, over. Soon the pulpy, furry remains will be pounded over and over into a red stain on the pavement. The discoloration temporary. The loss of life largely unnoticed.

 

You are unsure if you are grateful. You were, after all, happy once before you knew this part of yourself. You were content in the blissful ignorance that preceded this loss. Now that you have had a taste, all you feel is a biting hunger for what you hadn’t even known was missing. There is such weight to your solitude, such finality.

 

But what remains still holds promise. In the midst of your wreckage, they tell you to have the courage to trust love again. Maybe just once more. And you hope they are right; that the smoke will clear. Because there was that moment, that rupture in your timeline, when you realized you were capable of loving someone more than yourself. More than life.

 

And you never wanted to let it go.