Pieces of the Heart
Loving someone carves ineffable grooves into our soul. Long after they leave, we occasionally find ourselves idly tracing mental fingers down those broken lines inside us. A stranger wearing her perfume, a new boyfriend with the same wink, or maybe seeing a wedding announcement–the one you didn’t get–on a friend’s counter. And you ask yourself why you’re remembering. Are they really that hard to get over?
We give away little pieces of our heart to the people we love. In those first moments, we break our own heart. All those exciting, happy, terrible feelings are the tinkling sound of something shattering inside us. It’s wonderful. We break off a little piece of our soul and hide it in their back pocket when they aren’t looking. Maybe if they carry a piece of us with them then we will be with them forever.
But we discover, and rediscover again and again, that Johnny Cash was right: everyone goes away in the end. They walk away, inadvertently carrying pieces of us with them. It hurts, watching someone walk away with a limp strand of our heart mingling with the lint at the bottom of their pocket. Sometimes, beyond not caring, they don’t even realize that they carry us with them. They aren’t breaking our heart–we broke it ourselves–but with distance we finally experience the pain of separation that follows the quiet joy of a broken heart. Happiness and pain, pain and happiness, they are head and tail of the same beast. In fragments, abused and neglected though they may be, the pieces of our heart retain an echo of a heartbeat that goes on loving, no matter where they go. Thankless though it may be, we stay with those we loved, forever.
How many pieces can we break off before we don’t have a heart left to give? How thin can a man spread himself before he ceases to feel the difference between breaking and separation? Do we live in constant in danger of dispersing ourselves until we cease to exist? Or are the dispersions of our selves a way to be remembered after we are gone, an imperfect immortality?
We search for love without a heartbreak, not comprehending that love begins with a broken heart. We dream of carrying our love into eternity, never supposing that we don’t carry our own love at all. We carry with us tiny bits of the people who loved us. We imagine that the pain goes away, but it never will. We only acclimate to it. And occasionally we find ourselves, in a moment, remembering a missing piece of the heart and wonder, where could it be now?
This is very beautiful, and it just about–almost–helped untangle the knot of getting over someone.
June 12, 2010 at 9:31 pm
This post reminded me of The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane.
The heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.
June 13, 2010 at 1:45 am
That’s from “The Testing Tree” by Stanley Kunitz. Excellent poem.
July 10, 2010 at 8:46 pm
The imagery in this is beautiful.
July 5, 2010 at 3:15 pm
You may or may not be aware of this, but this post is perfect.
More please.
August 3, 2010 at 7:35 am
Masterpiece.
May 5, 2011 at 4:42 am
The strange thing is, speaking from experience, though we lose pieces of our hearts from time to time to various people, there are others whose hearts resonate with ours. They’re ‘compatible’ so to speak, like a blood transfusion, and restore our own. In the end, though little remains of our hearts, they can be restored. The pieces of our heart we lost are bound up with the pieces of another until we don’t remember well what we lost. All seems as it should be.
I had given away few but significant pieces of my heart before I met my wife. She bound up my heart with her own. I recently lost her, and with her a piece of my heart, but what was restored while she was here was more than I have lost in her absence. I think it was meant to be that way, and I will always be grateful for the patches of her heart that I carry with me.
Some pieces of the heart fall by the wayside, perhaps even most. But the pieces taken diminish, and the pieces given multiply. Somehow my heart is bigger than it originally was because of her. I will always be grateful.
December 15, 2011 at 12:03 pm
What a great post, just what I need right now, I cannot believe how much I miss my girlfriend who left on a mission last month. It was so odd, I knew our whole relationship that she was going but that did not stop me from giving up my heart. I don’t know it just felt like it was going to be worth the heartache I knew I was going to have to endure, it absolutely is. I don’t know what will happen, all I know is that for the few months I got to hold her I was a king.
January 21, 2012 at 8:44 am