Ordinary Heartbreak

Photo: author's own. Book: this. Number of black fly bites after this nap: 17.

It's funny sometimes, when you realize how utterly ordinary heartbreak is. When you are sitting in yoga class looking at your toes and realizing that if you tried to put what (and who) broke your heart into words it would just sound so ordinary. So plain. There was this person, and these things and then there wasn't and now I feel like this. What is the story there?

You realize that at the moment your heart is breaking (which comes when you are still for a moment) the hearts of approximately 870 million people are breaking as well. And yours matters to you, for those few minutes while the waves come in again, just as theirs matters to them. But you also realize that while your heart is breaking the hearts of most everyone else in the world are not breaking.

And you realize how perfectly ordinary, and how exquisitely painful it all is. And how the only way out of it is to get through each day, feeling whatever it is that comes up. And how there is no other way. And how there is no magic thing that someone can say or do to make it better. And how people 100 and 200 and 300 years ago felt this same exact feeling and the world just went on.