Heartbreak
You listen to songs you enjoyed and truly loved when you were younger, not young-still-drinking-milk-from-a-bottle-young but young as in still-basking-in-your-teenage-years-and-college-abandon-young, and you remember the times when you were still worried about going home past 10 pm, or looking at your cellphone only to find text after text and missed call after missed call from family members asking you where the fuck you are. Or the times when you spent hours, or even days, just choosing what to wear for a party because you want people to notice you and think, “Oh hey, she’s kinda cute. Maybe I should ask for her number.” Or the long drives, numerous wine and beer bottles and cigarette butts and embarrassing moments you’ve shared with your friends. Or the long talks you’ve had with them about how the person you offered your heart to has offered his or her heart to somebody else. You listen to these songs and feel some sort of calm washing over you because nostalgia, as Don Draper explained in an episode of Mad Men, takes you back to a time, to a place when you know you were loved.
Then it begins. The heartbreak begins. The heartache follows. Most people only know of the shallowest form of heartbreak - the one you get from a love gone wrong. Not that that kind of heartbreak is trivial or irrelevant, for you are consumed with inexplicable pain when it happens, it’s just that most people don’t realize or fail to recognize that there are different kinds of heartbreak, and once they happen, they have no idea what to do with themselves. The heartbreak I am talking about is the one you get right after you’ve had your fill of memories. The one you get when you are trying to chase that feel-good emotion you’ve had and relished not too long ago only to find that you will never get it back. Right now you might have what you have desperately wanted when you were slightly younger - the job, the money, the freedom, the love life, the sex - but you can’t help but get sucked into that void you feel somewhere around the area of your chest. That kind of heartbreak.
You might be having your heart broken right now, especially if you’re already working and in your twenties. You also might be thinking that I’m writing this because I’ve gotten it all figured out and that I might be able to give you some advice. You are wrong. I am just as lost as you are. My heart is just as broken as yours.
I do know one thing though: this won’t last forever, unless you want it to.
Then it begins. The heartbreak begins. The heartache follows. Most people only know of the shallowest form of heartbreak - the one you get from a love gone wrong. Not that that kind of heartbreak is trivial or irrelevant, for you are consumed with inexplicable pain when it happens, it’s just that most people don’t realize or fail to recognize that there are different kinds of heartbreak, and once they happen, they have no idea what to do with themselves. The heartbreak I am talking about is the one you get right after you’ve had your fill of memories. The one you get when you are trying to chase that feel-good emotion you’ve had and relished not too long ago only to find that you will never get it back. Right now you might have what you have desperately wanted when you were slightly younger - the job, the money, the freedom, the love life, the sex - but you can’t help but get sucked into that void you feel somewhere around the area of your chest. That kind of heartbreak.
You might be having your heart broken right now, especially if you’re already working and in your twenties. You also might be thinking that I’m writing this because I’ve gotten it all figured out and that I might be able to give you some advice. You are wrong. I am just as lost as you are. My heart is just as broken as yours.
I do know one thing though: this won’t last forever, unless you want it to.