❝I know it's hard for you to be friends with a girl without objectifying her - but lucky me, not everyone's you!❞
❝Oh yeah. 𝙁𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙨. The lady goth protest too much.❞
❝𝘿𝙤𝙩𝙝, Gavin. Doth.❞
→ From Van Zandt family disappointment and Grade 8...
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Hearts don't break. I've learned with time and some of my more repetitive mistakes how lousy a euphemism that is.
They don't break. They don't crack. Glass and porcelain break or shatter. Even stone can crack with enough force. Bones are solid, or broken, or fixed. Meanwhile, feelings are not so concrete as the terms we use for them.
Our hearts are smallish fists made of soft tissue. They tear. They clog. They clot. They stop.
Heartbreak doesn't account for what happens in our stomachs and throats, says nothing of clenched jaws or pressured sinuses or stinging eyes. It includes nothing about the hollowness we harbor, how we become empty rooms. It definitely doesn't account for our neuroses, because brain functions aren't poetic.
Heartbreak seems so small of a phrase. Too small. Too confined to romance, when friends or family could just as easily hurt you, sometimes with more precision and gusto. People often forget how we shred, scatter, and bury our own happiness — sometimes because we don't know any better, other times in an attempt to value others over ourselves. We too frequently allow ourselves to live with pain, never once mentioning all the times we created it.
So, no, hearts don't break. Not really.
I like to think of it more as a rupture.
"Are you okay?" Ellie asked as we walked through the school lobby on a shockingly cold spring day.
"Great. Fantastic. Magnifico." I felt like shit.
"Okay, just cause you heard Marco's dad say it doesn't mean you can say it."
We had a MI project and I grouped with Ellie and Ellie's new boyfriend Marco, which mostly consisted of us watching Bollywood movies and eating authentic Italian food in a warm and welcoming townhouse. A while longer, and Ellie and I tried to learn How Soon Is Now by The Smiths on the upright piano, failing gloriously. Marco's dad came home, overjoyed to meet Marco's girlfriend and complimenting our very bad piano playing.
Even when both of Marco's parents asked me borderline not okay things when trying to decipher my racial ambiguity— something Marco tried and failed to stop — I couldn't help but entertain the questions. In retrospect, it's amazing what I put up with to reside in places that actually felt normal and safe, especially under the guise of 'they mean well'.
