Halfway through my rant, I realized I was telling this to myself more than him.
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As the younger of two brothers, I was fortunate to learn many of life’s adolescent lessons without having to endure them myself. I learned how to sneak booze from my dad without having to get caught first. I observed what it meant to devote yourself fully to a craft, and how to let it consume you. I learned to fight, to try, to fail, to try and try and try and never stop long past the time when everyone else has replaced calling you “determined” with “stubborn.” It wasn’t until university that I had to figure things out on my own.
The transition was rough. For the first time I was making my own mistakes, cleaning my own messes, getting my own lazy ass out to class in the morning and to varsity practice at night. I figured out how to blow two hundred dollars at the bar and then get home without a penny left to my name. I found the trick to smuggling laundry baskets of food from the cafeteria to my dorm room. I fell in love for the first time, and eventually suffered heartbreak for the first time.
I hate writing that phrase, and I only recently learned why.
I don’t have a younger sibling to teach with my successes and failures the way my brother taught me. So whenever a friend looks for my help with something new to them, I take it seriously, whether it’s about dealing with school, moving, being alone, or being poor.
An old friend called me up the other day. This is that friend everyone needs; the one who hasn’t had a cruel thought since cell phones were no longer spy technology, who would do anything to help anyone. Through his choked small talk, it was obvious this wasn’t a happy catch-up call.
After a long silence, he asked me how to fix a broken heart.
To my surprise, I was furious. Not with him for having been hurt, or with whoever the other half of the equation was, but with the phrase “broken heart.”
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To my surprise, I was furious. Not with him for having been hurt, or with whoever the other half of the equation was, but with the phrase “broken heart.” Suddenly I understood why I hated it.
“You can’t,” I said. “You can’t fix it because it’s not broken.”
He started a retort, saying something about my not knowing how he was feeling. I cut him off.
“Hearts don’t break, you idiot. Hearts rip. Hearts tear. They twist and peel and swell and pare until they’re unrecognizable as a heart at all. But they don’t break. They’re not some machine that stops working when you take a piece away, or a single cog gets misplaced. They keep working, endlessly, perfectly, in their new shape.”
Halfway through my rant, I realized I was telling this to myself more than him.
So often as men we’re wired to think about solving a problem where it is presented. This is broken. Just squirt some WD40 on there and wrap it in duct tape. Fixed. I know my friend wanted me to tell him what he asked for. “How do you fix a broken heart?” He wanted to hear what everyone expects to hear:
Go get drunk. Go get laid. Spend some time with the guys. Teach yourself to hate her. You’ll forget about it. Move on. There’s plenty of fish and so on and so on.
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Go get drunk. Go get laid. Spend some time with the guys. Teach yourself to hate her. You’ll forget about it. Move on. There’s plenty of fish and so on and so on.
I still hold a torch for that girl from first year of university, and after a decade I don’t expect that will ever fully go away. But the shape of my heart now accommodates that. It’s made room for that nostalgia. I spent a long, long time trying to figure out how to “fix” myself, and that had a far more destructive effect on my life than the actual heartache ever did. My writing stopped. Working out stopped. Everything except for finding the fix stopped.
I reiterated to us both: “There is no fix, because you’re not broken. There’s nothing wrong with you that needs correction. It’s still going to hurt like hell. But eventually you’ll find your new shape, and someone that compliments it.”
“There is no fix, because you’re not broken. There’s nothing wrong with you that needs correction. It’s still going to hurt like hell. But eventually you’ll find your new shape, and someone that compliments it.”
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We may wish it was just like a fixing a machine: a simple procedure and you’re back in working order right where you started. And at least broken it could snap, stop functioning and give a blessed reprieve. Yet it just keeps on ticking, differently, on an uncomfortably altered beat, never quite the same as before.
I think that’s where it’s hardest. Learning that this new shape, this new tempo, is just as good as it was before. In fact it’s better. The memory of the last melody is what makes a tempo change stronger. You couldn’t start your next relationship without growing from the first just as you couldn’t start Bohemian Rhapsody on “I see a little ‘silhouetto’ of a man.” The bridge between the two might be worse than either separately, but all together? Well, that’s how you make a masterpiece.
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Image by Felix Nine