Notes on Heartbreak

by Annie Lord

That’s the thing about pain: we forget it. Our bodies can withstand more than we give them credit for.

‘Everything is so sharp when you are young,’ she smiled. ‘When you’re old like me you might even miss feeling this bad.’

Up to 60 per cent of the body is made up of water; does that mean once I have cried all of it out I will be a different person? One filled with a liquid less tainted by sadness?

‘I’m sorry,’ I tell her, feeling sorry for no one but myself.

And as I’m walking to my room I realise I didn’t think of Joe throughout the whole of dinner. And I only think of him now because I force myself to. Just to make sure it still hurts.

Why should I alone shoulder the burden of memory when he is so quick to throw it away?

I guess that’s how people go on, without knowing how.

Heartbreak is like a chronic illness I have learned to live with.

Friends and family do so much to get you through break-ups. Listen as you cry into the phone. Order a curry to your Wetherspoon’s table to guarantee you eat something. But then there are these strangers who come along and help you in ways the ones close to you never could. And they’re never thanked because, for whatever reason, it would be too intense for them to know the depth of the pain they tugged you away from. So they do their invisible labour quietly, unknowingly pulling you from a darkness they can’t even see. It’s unfair that our closest friends work so hard to help us and then a man like this can do it without even trying. While acting in ways that still benefit his own interests.

‘You can get her back, but she won’t be the same girl.’

because the last time I believed in happiness it left and its departure did worse things to me than sadness ever could.