“Have you ever had your heart broken?”

I’d be lying if I said this was the first time I’d gotten such an inquest. I should blame my generally detached exterior in proverbial ‘matters of the heart’ for having someone wonder aloud, “Have you ever had your heart broken?” It’s standard fare after a certain age when people try to dig deeper into your character and its makings.

I think perhaps for the first time I thought deeper and answered more honestly because I really gave it some thought.

“No.”

I often say that I don’t really believe people get heartbroken from relationships, I think your heart gets wounded, pummeled, battered, sorely bruised, mulled, hacked, assaulted, chipped in fact. But like Maya Angelou’s caged bird, it is a resilient appendage and will rise and rise again.

Synonyms for Broken include Ruined, Damaged…Unfixable.

I think that every time I answer with a certain, “No”, those who feel they have indeed had their hearts broken by a woman or man in a relationship stare at me askance and give some variant of the phrase, “It will happen don’t you worry.”

…and I return to filing my nails wondering, “Is that a threat or a promise though?”  

I think perhaps I have a different understanding of heartbreak.

A popular quote says “As long as there is life, there is hope.” Reflechir un peu avec moi s’il vous plait, why would a mistress- with neither logical nor objective grounds for believing a married man- remain in his life for 18 long years, put her life on pause, and remain waiting for a man who (clearly shows apathy to commitment) to commit to her?

Yet if he died, she might move on. She’d have no choice.

Death is closure. Forced closure. It forces a full stop in life where a comma might have been used instead. Death takes away a million tiny, pointless yet precious opportunities with the departed. It removes chances; closes doors we weren’t even sure we would have entered yet were pleased to know we had the option to.

Death is final.

Death is crushing and painful and halting.

Death is heartbreak.

Death is stretching. It expands soul space to shield old memories, lengthens the pain threshold and widens the perspective of the survivor. It alters your vision so you learn that nothing truly has the capacity to seize, squeeze, to steal your soul. Nothing.

But, it breaks you first.

I’ve said it before but it’s still wonderment to me, to think that following Ibiso’s death I suddenly developed crushing chest pains. After a thorough examination, the doctor admitted that the only thing wrong with me…was grief.

I daily suffered through harsh, tearing stabs in my chest. They accosted me daily, not when I cried or laughed, breathing alone was enough to call them forth in their taloned glory. I felt like my glass heart had broken and the million shattered pieces were piercing organs in their vicinity. Like the pain in my heart was so much that it was bursting my chest and tearing angrily through skin. Like it was far too heavy to sit on an x-ray glass and explain to a doctor its urgency or potency; I felt like the pain tore through my chest in painful hacks, struggling for an aborted relief.

So no, I have never been heartbroken in the way you mean.