Heart Like a Wheel by Stefana Lapadean

 

Define heartache. Not by the dictionary or from stories people have told you, but your heartache, through your own experience, in your own words and from your own perspective. It’s almost impossible, isn’t it? It’s like the words choke you even before you think them. What’s true, however, is that even though our hearts ache for different things, different reasons, everyone feels it the same way: excruciatingly painful.

Some days, the heartache passes almost unnoticed. Like the ghost of a past you desperately want to hold on to, that lingers heavily in the air, unseen, undisturbed. The only reason you can sense it is because at times it makes it hard to breathe properly. So you sigh.
Other days it actually goes away, and for a while you are whole again, able to lend your soul to other feelings for a change, able to embrace the meaning of other experiences without filtering them through the shadow of this persistent heartache.

At times, the intensity of the heartache gets to you, and nostalgia kicks in and you can feel your heart break time and time again as if it were happening right before your eyes, until eventually you break down. Sometimes you listen to sad music to get through the day, sometimes it makes you weep with misery or frustration or anger. Sometimes it makes you want to die. It overwhelms you and you can actually feel a pain in your chest for which there’s never a physical reason, but it still aches and burns.

Most days, though, you fight the heartache, you do your best to keep it at bay and banish it to the far corners of your being. And that may work for an indefinite period of time, but heartache feeds on the darkness of our souls so when it fights back, it’s twice as strong as we remember and always takes us by surprise. Then you break down again. And then there’s a lull and then another wave hits you. And that can go on forever, really, however mad with grief you may become.
Heartache takes no account of one’s state of mind or soul, or of one’s mental integrity. It just keeps pushing forward, endlessly.
Take no account of it.