A Letter to Broken Hearts
Note: I do not own the letter below. I just found it on the site [URL="http://theletters.org/index.php/home/letter/83" target="_blank"]theletters.org[/URL]. It's an open letter.
We’ve all been through it or bound to go through it - the quintessential painfully funny experience of having a broken heart. Be it on a love we had and lost or the suffering of it even before possession.
Much as we all wish there is a scientific way of dealing with the emotional misery, coping is as relative as the psychosis of romantic jealousy. There is no proven formula, no tried and tested way out, no injectible immunity drug.
Options are many and insanity is powerfully silly.
There are those who avoid being alone because every moment of silence forces them to feel the pain. They surround themselves with people even if it means doing things they don’t usually do – bar hopping to death even if they hate alcohol and cigarettes and loud music, try out new sports even if it means breaking every bone in their body and growing new ones, coffee in Starbucks even if caffeine causes LBM. Physiological torture becomes much more bearable compared to the pain of sharp pinches of the hearts now scattered around into million pieces.
Alcohol seems to be a top five favourite as if the substance can somehow melt the million pieces to infinite nothingness. The trip to the bathroom becomes an exciting exercise that exhausts their spirits to wonderland. They prefer being drunk because when they are sober, their lives are so miserable. When they are wasted, their lives are still miserable but at least they don’t care.
Technology is somehow a new kit for survival, too. I saw a blog become a 24-hour coverage of her freshly broken-hearted life. There, she curses every one whom she claims contributed to her sorrows and she name names in all their screaming glory. If she had a hiccup for every time she curses, she’d be dead by now.
This is my favourite – the sweet transformation to violence advocates. Target shooting, aikido, arnis and mixed martial arts are suddenly the perfect complement to the numbing treachery of their experience. When they work their imagination hard enough, the face of their ex transforms to a target.
There are extreme cases too – they resort to sleeping pills, proxac, dormicums and others from the same clan matched with psychiatric treatment.
Others try to look their better - get a new haircut, come up with a new fashion statement, loose every excess pounds. They physically reinvent with colors and accessories. Wala nga namang point - miserable ka na nga, miserable pa itsura mo. Redundant.
Most of the time, you see facets of these people you have never seen before. It turns their world upside down and their personalities inside out. You discover skills you’d never thought someone like them would have, it turns the toughest into an epileptic mongoloid single cell life form - brain cells disappear, etiquettes are forgotten, new personalities emerge.
You don’t know whether you should pity or be embarrassed for and at them because at one point or another, you were exactly who they are and you didn’t know any better. You can't deny it, you want to help and often, we don't know how.
You know what, maybe there isn’t any better way. Maybe they don't need our help. Maybe, the best help we can extend is by giving them enough space to make more mistakes, be worse and trust them enough to know for sure, they'll bounce back.
The fact is, there is no rule of thumb when it comes to healing a broken heart because, though guns, alcohol, friends or a fashion make over may help, only time could truly heal a broken heart.
