Heartbreak
on REM Zoe Lara (in India) (India), 06/May/2011 12:30, 34 days ago
Before I had my heart hurt,‘heartbroken’ was a corny phrase that conjured the listless lines of the heart-limp opening character in a Shakespeare play I had read at school –"If music be the food of love, play on,Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,The appetite may sicken, and so die".– Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 1For me, Orsino’s brand of self-indulgent wallowing signifies the decibels of difference between unrequited feelings, never satisfied by the reality of love; and the painful awareness that prickled like slow poison in my skin when I was muted by a man who had steadfastly returned my love for four and a half years.For me, heartbreak was a slow sort of poison, starting with an anaesthetic. The day I found out the extent of the deception and infidelity that would sag in my veins later on, I became so numb that I didn’t feel a thing. When the news arrived by text message, I stared back at it and – like a robot mechanically inputting into a library catalogue – I called the source and said very simply that it was over; because rationally (only my rational brain worked then), there was no way that I would beable to trust him again. I went back to the job I had been doing when the text message arrived: interviewing finalists who wanted to volunteer in Vanuatu; finished it; then walked out blinking into Broad Street.In the days afterward, friends fluttered around me like careful butterflies, making the world around seem more delicate, more colourful– but too flitting and fleeting, too delicate with me, to penetrate the quiet of my suffering. I felt nothing but reacted physically all the same: Climbing stairs was completely exhausting; and after a certain stretch of time in company, numbness overcame me and I’d quietly withdraw myself to lie for an hour or so on my bed, just sensing the stillness that had seeped into my world. My ex-fiancé had a face to me in those silent moments of closed curtains and ceiling cracks that created the disjunct of denial between the man I loved and what he had done. I couldn’t let myself believe thathe was capable of deceiving me so repeatedly, so some vision of another man stepped into the hollow in my head and disconnected itself from my heart.I knew from watching the faces of my friends and hearing their outrage on my behalf verbalised for my benefit how I ought to feel, if feel I could. So partly out of a desire to find something in my heart remotely resembling their anger, I posted a poem on my blog detailing the emotions that kept failing to arrive–Time does not bring relief; you all have liedWho told me time would ease me of my pain!I miss him in the weeping of the rain;I want him at the shrinking of the tide;The old snows melt from every mountain-side,And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;But last year's bitter loving must remainHeaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!There are a hundred places where I fearTo go,--so with his memory they brim!And entering with relief some quiet placeWhere never fell his foot or shone his faceI say, "There is no memory of him here!"And so stand stricken, so remembering him.-Edna St Vincent MillayIt wasn’t like that, though. In my last days as a graduate student, I traipsed round Oxford cuddling memories of a man whose warmth I still felt all around me. The day I bought some celebratory balloons for friends finishing exams, I tiptoed mute around the city: a twenty-something ghost with laddered tights and hot legs and a helium heart-shaped balloon trailing behind. I stared up behind me at its lofty, translucent rubber, thinking with love of the man who had bought me a similar balloon when I’d finished my finals just two years before. I smiled the smile of a quiet, crazy person pining for alost love, not for a broken one.-----------------The two-month interval between Oxford and Delhi was a blur of lots of action. I had such a happy summer, darting about meeting new people, seeing a little more of the UK and a little less of my bedroom than I had when balled-up in my home like my discarded revision notes, frantically writing my MPhil thesis and scribbling for exams. I made new friends, visited an island, saw the statue of liberty in New York and the Canadian ocean from a park in Vancouver; and one evening by a lake, in the giddiness that accompanies certain departure, I kissed somebody new to me: total abandon and all of the floaty feelings of a first kiss that I’d long forgotten. I was an exam vampire who had walked out into the light again; and the world was blurry and beautiful, even though I was weighted down in still moments by a certainty that this bright world was enchanted and not my own. My pain surpassed my disbelief only when I slept; and memories I’d suppressed by involuntary self-anaesthesia blew up into screaming nightmares. I woke up sobbing with the weight of cruel taunts, what had happened exaggerated by dreams that made it much worse. Ironically, the thirdTwilightfilm came out in the cinema in the month before my dreaming began; and thinking of Bella pining for her vampire lover who abandoned her in the second movie brought a small, ironic smile to my lips(!), the only time what I suppressed and what I lived acknowledged one another. I still tried to feel the emotions on others’ empathic faces, but the closest that I got was a sense of looming certainty that I would fall in the future.----------------I crashed in Delhi. It was a confusing place to crash, with strange sights and smells; smoke, incense, the acrid stench of ammonia and exhaust fumes heated by the sun; dogs barking, autorickshaws chug-chugging, SUVs swooshing by; honking horns, temple-tops; dirty narrow allies laced with sewage and urine and market peddlers with wooden carts settled into the sludge, peddling everything from vegetables to saris to trade in plastics. People were all around me; and there seemed no place to hide away. The day I finally stopped sleeping on a stone floor and bought a bed and mattress for my new flat, I wet it with polluted, noisy tears, drowned out only by the steady whir of a ceiling fan and the comforting murmurs of my mum, who listened with a faraway empathy while I sobbed exhaustedly down the phone.Skype became a source of solace for the questions that now flurried into my mind–why, how, when we were so happy together. Yet the blurred, scrambled images on a slow video chat connection were blurred and scrambled further by other events that hit me in those months: a new job; the concept of city poverty growing faces for me with each new encounter on the street; and most gravely, an incident that happened overseas that I stopped work to try to sort. I felt so jumbled and everything ran at me so quickly that I only hoped at the beginning of each morning that I would manage to get to the end of each day. I had a constant lump of anxiety in my body that a doctor in a sterilised hospital drop-in clinic would later call astress reaction. This was Delhi, to me: the most smoky, noisy, confusing place of my little life so far; and I had no idea how much of the smoke and noise and confusion belonged to the city; and how of it much belonged to me. My happiest moments in those first three months were the laid-back laugh on the phone of the man by the lake, who had made me feel secure and light; and who had disappeared off to Africa to be a VSO volunteer himself.December I spent in Zambia with him and with the cast of The Lion King. When the plane touched down (in transit) in Ethiopia I literally cheered to be on african soil, grinning madly in the transit lounge at the milieu of european, indian, african, middle eastern, brightly-coloured-and-big-bottomed, or skinny and khaki-clad people, burqhas next to hotpants and tight tops, all standing next to one another in a hodge-podge of nationalities. Out jogging in the bush; and staring at a zambian lightning storm from across a lake on new year's eve, I found some peace again; alongside staring googly-eyed at the slender necks of giraffes crossing roads, the slack grey ears of slow-moving elephants; stopping in the car to braid the hair of Zambian villagers while men tried to fix our leaky car radiator; and fighting off baboons trying to steal food from our tent. Somewhere on the long car journeys, I started to untangle my soul. My hair had actually started to fall out before I left for Africa but before I became the Cadbury’s Cream Egg Man, some truth materialised in my heart that finally clicked it into sync with my head. In desperation to record it in case the emptiness returned, it was race-typed on a broken keyboard in an airport lounge on the way back to India. What I wrote was for him and belongs to him ratherthan to me and my own private world, so I will keep it private; but the main thrust was the strong sense that it was time to let go.---------------------In my own experience of heart hurt, no one feeling lingers for long. When the numbness receded in favour of a little emotional conviction, anger finally set in. For two weeks, I power-walked home from work and shouted unnecessary threats at autorickshaw drivers trying to haggle with me; I fidgeted at my work keyboard and tried to rid myself of the cold hand gripping at my lungs and threatening to linger there. I made jerky one-off decisions and then apologised profusely for them, angry with myself for not knowing how to handle an unfamiliar emotion. That was around the time that I decided to see a doctor; and I spontaneously cried in his office. In my confusion, I still needed the man I loved, just as I had needed him to help untangle my tangled moments while we had been together. Talking to him in the depths of my hurt was a two-sided comfort blanket– familiar first, then painful afterwards; because of what it signified.Yet, it has become easier. Hurt, anger, loss and sadness still repeat their cycles now, though the feelings involved seem increasingly less acute. I can make it to the end of a difficult day without fighting an impulse to call, which means that the part of me that needed him is now free. With each part of love that dies, though, my heart hurts a little bit more. Movies taught me to believe that hurting and healing are separate stages; but they overlap, tug and egg on one another.So this is the history of ten months in the UK and in Delhi that has also been the history of my heart here. I hope that the man in Zambia forgives me for penning down a private world he knows only a little about– I wrote it partly in the hope that I can draw a line between then and now when we are next back together; and take my heart back for him. I’ve published it because I don’t think that enough realistic things are written about heartbreak, even though many of us carry black blobs of past pain on the history of our hearts. Orsino’s line ought more sensibly to have been –If time be the food of heart hurt, pass time;Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,The pain may sicken and so subsideIt’s not quite so literary nor so dramatic as Shakespeare, but in my own experience, it’s a little truer.