Lani's Truths

Lani's Truth #2 (The Truth About Heartbreak)

The pain has shaped you. Infinite nights of lying in bed wondering why you're not enough has warped and moulded your perception, your being. You have fallen apart in several directions and you barely recognise yourself now; you put your pieces back together differently.

There really is no way to explain it; heartbreak is so dynamic, so profound and vastly intangible. It cannot be grasped. More than that, it is highly personal and I don't think that any two people in the history of mankind have ever experienced it in the same way. You will never find someone that entirely understands your pain.

Most of the time, you can't even understand your own pain. I couldn't—I don't. But I will try to expand upon it. I will try to fit the billion-sided shape that is heartbreak into the two dimensional context of words. I will try.

And it goes like this:

It is impossible to measure your own heartbreak against someone else's. Pain can be so self-motivated and vibrant that it's easy to forget you're not the only one. Heartbreak has the incredible ability to endure though the roller-coaster of emotions that follow any great trauma of the heart. It won't leave you alone.

The unfortunate truth is this: you have to endure missing someone until you don't miss them anymore. When will that be? No one can tell you. It's just one of those things, those crazy things that seem to force the mind, body and spirit to work together, inseparable, unchangeable and completely intangible. Everything seems to weigh you down but you have to wait patiently, impatiently, for that change.

Everything changes.

One day you have to be able to say: I fell in love with them, they were the best part of that chapter of my life. It's all over with now but in a way it will never be over because every minute was amazing and I'll always be damn certain that I loved them with the only heart I'll ever have.'

You have to be able to say that; it's the only way to get out of bed every morning. It's the only way to make it through the day.

You can tell yourself over and over, "I shouldn't be sad. I didn't lose someone that loves me. They lost someone that loves them." But behind every truth like that is a grey wolf in the pool of your shadow and it goes like this, "They didn't want me. They left me. I wasn't good enough. The good times weren't good enough; the attraction wasn't strong enough. I didn't take their breath away every time they kissed me; I didn't keep them up at night thinking about me; they didn't get butterflies every time they glimpsed me in the shower or when I ran my fingers over their belly. I wasn't outstanding enough to make them want me. I wasn't attractive enough for them to keep me. I couldn't force them into these categories so irrelevant to their nature and so essential to my own."

"I couldn't make them love me."

And it hurts, of course it hurts. Nothing is just a cliché and feeling yourself suffer isn't the same as watching someone else suffer. It's a different kind of pain. And it isn't only pain, it's also that forsaking sense of diminished worth. Everything you ever thought was good about yourself becomes irrelevant.

To love is to be vulnerable. It hurts. Unbearably. There really is no easy solution.

You're the one that has to cry yourself to sleep. You're the one that has to smile and pretend that everything is okay. You're the one that has to go to bed every night wondering why you weren't enough when every night, sleeps swallows their torment.

Not yours.

You're just trying to survive.

And you're doing a good job.

You see, all of this can be avoided. You can lock away your heart in the safe confines of an air-tight soul and it can remain there, immobile, airless and unbearably still. And there, it will be totally untouchable, pristine and preserved. But it will also be impenetrable. It will be hardened and desensitised to the emotions that are essential to humanity. And again, you will suffer.

To love is to be vulnerable, but that is perhaps better than the alternative.

So, my darling, remember that you are a white-wolf. You are pure and you are magical.

Don't let the grey wolf destroy you.

Or worse, become you.