As I waited for you to say what you had come to say, my heart beat so hard that it hurt. If I’d ever tried to picture a heart breaking I think I would have imagined a sudden and a loud shattering crack. A splintering. Shards of glass, shards of ice ricocheting, damaging. But I found that it wasn’t like that.
When you said the words that I’d known were coming all along, my chest became free of its constriction, all tightness gone. I felt my heart burst. Burst wetly, liquefying in to a hot shrieking wailing banshee. It was an immediate disassembly, ugly and raw. Not a clean sharp break at all. I was now literally all heart. A spongy mass exhaling its last deep sour breath.
After a few hours’ sleep and all the bottle of merlot that you had opened but not stayed to drink, I awoke fully clothed on my bed to feel the wetness dispersing quickly like flood water. A tide draining away leaving muddy sucking sinkholes.
Since then my heart has continued to dry out until only resin’d strips like the wrappings wound about a mummified body, remain. It is now a desiccated thing. It continues to beat, for which I suppose I should be grateful. I breathe in and I breathe out. In and out. In and out. I live. I function. But the pulse of love has quite gone.
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