This is a story about the aftermath of a 4-year relationship and the enduring feelings of life with a broken heart.

Food doesn’t taste the same anymore.  In fact, life in general no longer holds the same wonder and wildness.  When quietness creeps in like a shadow, the soft sobs are the only sound in the stillness.  Her eyes burn with salty tears that pool until they overflow to begin a journey.

There, a tear gently, silently resting on her smooth cheek, breaking and magnifying the light from inside that bleeds from her very soul.  It cuts a wet trail of sorrow as an outward expression of so much within.  Traveling ever downward, it pauses to gather at her chin until finally, it falls to her broken breast where, sharp and hot there rages, reason for its being.

In these moments, there is a wrenching of the gut like a wringing of the hands.  A life inside of a pain and darkness that she doesn’t fully understand.  Yet it remains like the pack of a peddler on her back…something that she can’t explain.  Four years play like scenes from a movie before her eyes adding to the anguish.  It’s inescapable, but palpable like the bittersweet thrust of a blade in her chest.  No one ever quite gets it: her family or the people she used to know.

She knows it so well as the constant pulse in her breast that makes her question her existence at best.  She looks for a glimmer of hope in the dark…the stark…coldness.  She only finds a fear of growing old with the nothingness, the knife in her chest, and the ache in her breast of the terrible knowing that without love she will continue through life like this.

Donning a mask once more as the sorrow fades into her core, she hides the redness of her eyes.  She feigns a thing called strength fighting never to appear weak or broken from the splitting of her soul from the one who brought meaning and depth to life.  Lying in the arms of another, she wonders if everything will always feel second best like it does right now.

With time will the memory and feelings fade?  Will the images ever disappear or the spoken words that resound in her mind?  She is dying to stop wanting for more or at least what once was.  Nothing spans the chasm once bridged by words, love, the sound of a voice, a meeting face to face…that completeness is lost.

Love songs resound on a loop in her mind as she goes from day to day.  All of this is hidden in the careful building of a wall that’s a lie she is telling herself.  If anyone knew, they might write her off as emotional and weak, so it’s tucked in the back of her heart next to faith and the stars.  Life moves forward save for the moments that fill those four years replaying at random when the walls break down.

Others know her by these same things in themselves.  They know the bitter tears and despair of love lost and never returning.  They know the dreams that haunt and wake with deep anguished breaths and a realness they can’t bear or explain.

The tears and darkness are in everyone filed away behind living, working, brilliance, and light.  Hidden in the murky depths of strength where meaning and motivation overpower the negative by sheer will.  Where sharp and hot there rages the reason to live to the fullest in spite of it all.

Authored by Ava Fails, US