Via a one word reply

With punctuation

And an emoji

That felt off

Challenge: “Tell me how your heart was broken”

Yellow means caution:

My liver failed and my eyes turned yellow. My gallbladder failed and my skin turned yellow. My kidneys failed and I filled up with yellow. My pancreas failed and I shit yellow. My bone marrow failed and I bled yellow. My spine failed and everyone called me yellow. All of my other organs, tissues, and cells failed, so they paled yellow, as well.

My heart, the last to go, finally broke when I inevitably died from all of the yellow. It broke because I loved living so much. But it couldn't do it alone and had to give in to the yellow. I should have minded the caution.

You’d think it would be loud: the sound of a shattering heart.

How could something so monumental pass without noise?

You’d think a broken heart would roar

Or scream

Or crack like ice breaking away from a glacier

Or wail like a tsunami siren

Or, at the very least, whisper

No. The day my heart broke, it did so silently.

It didn’t even make the patter of the teardrop that spread like night-blooming jasmine on the canvas of my black jeans.

No.

All that noise a broken heart might’ve made was relegated to the corners of my mind.

All that pounding only sounding in the headache that battered my temples.

Every piece of me froze right along with my heart.

The ice inside acting like glue instead.

Everything went still in me.

I was a statue, stuck in an endless loop of sameness, while the world continued to whirl around me.

You’d think the Earth would stop spinning, caught up in the net of your grief.

But it does not.

Instead, it moves on without you.

You’d think the smell would be caught in their nostrils, too.

That it might catch them unaware the way it does you.

But rain on pavement doesn’t remind them about her little skinned knee like it does you.

You’d think it would taste like blood: the grief–the broken heart.

How could something so bitter taste like sunscreen and cherry popsicles instead?

No. The day my heart broke, it did so silently, tasting of summer, smelling of coconut and petrichor and lightning. And the world still spun.

But she did not move.

And so I remain frozen, too.

The dark has one demand

always one, of us... as an ear

suctioned to the chest

of Life,

with

shock

and grievance:

"Tell me how..."

listening, not breathing;

"...how your heart..."

in utter silence

of internal night

"...was broken?!"

shook

...no longer beating

when the whole world

out here, goes on living???

battered

by youth's follies

my heart

never broke

though I drowned

myself

in tears

and scribbled

page upon

page

of

insipid

poetry

of love

and

loss.

i only thought it was broken.

i knew

the difference

when i felt

it crack

and shatter

in my chest,

the pain

physical,

excruciating,

the day

you told me

you wanted

to die,

my sweet

lover of life

whose

joie de vivre

had

long ago

silenced

my own lifelong

melancholy.

only then was my heart truly broken.

You do not know, but when you speak of this place far away, your home, I feel like I should go.

You are homesick for it, but I also long for this land I have never seen. This place is where I want to be, where the mountains kiss the sky, and I would never have to say goodbye.

It hurts too much. Do you really mean it when you say you want to keep in touch?

I fear I am losing you, and the days are growing far too few. Will you ever miss me? Will I ever be free, free from this longing to be with you?

In May, my heart will break. You will smile, and I’ll have to fake. I’ll have to pretend I am happy to return to the place where I belong, my home. You will believe me, but you could not be any more wrong.

When you leave on a plane and return to the place where the mountains kiss the sky, every day, I will cry.

Here, you could never stay, because I see what it does to you day by day.

I was not born there. I have never known that mountain air, but how I long for this home where my heart is free to roam with you by my side, and there would never have to be a great divide.

One day I hope to visit, and I pray you don’t forget it. You tell me not to worry, but why do I feel like my heart is going to break, and why do I feel like there is so much at stake?

But if you care as you say you do, I know you will always be true.

There's some horrible website that posts videos of people dying by unnatural causes.

Car crashes where the people inside slowly burn alive, men in third-world countries being tortured and tied up on a public city street. Beheaded later. Head on a stake outside of a public market, the flies gravitating towards the sweet smell of it.

A guy I know showed it to me. He said, "The worst part is when they know that they are about to die."

"That they only have a few seconds left to live."

He said, "You can see it in their eyes."

I have lived a life of heartbreak, which, I think, exists only by unnatural causes. Perhaps it dies by them, too.

Where's the video of a person in love, being told, "You're a very nice girl, but I'm interested in someone else?"

Heartbreak is a b*mb detonating. It is not the look someone has before it happens, it is the moment right after, when it's already too late, when they realize that they never had a chance to begin with.

hearts are born broken

swiss cheese organs

full of wholes

life fills the crevices

knits the beating pulp

or tears it further asunder

toss the die

either way you lose

snake eyes empty vessels

Before:

I thought.

I thought maybe we could be the pair of lovers who walked side by side, not needing to touch, comfortable to accompany the other, in silent communion.

I made movies in my head. A friendship that maybe could lead to more?

In the thick of it:

Then I stopped dreaming so often. You would look at me and I did not know what text to read from you. From your eyes? From your limbs? Or just from your voice? What were you really saying? Was I looking just to look?

Now:

Now I am awake, your words a halting rejection through clenched teeth showed me I did "read you right" after all. Now, I do not yearn for you. At first not as often and then not much at all. It seems to have happened overnight or maybe it was many nights. What I know is that I am now the one who isn’t able to always see you. I see you and I do not know if I feel anything anymore: is it gone or will it come back?

I do not yet understand how this happened. My first instinct is to look at myself and wonder if I am broken, or that I am running away from the prospect of a relationship, because I believe I cannot have one, because I am afraid of intimacy. I think this has always been true, even before, before he came and

t

o

o

k.

Or

maybe I do not want to date you and you are a friend. A friend from the beginning and a friend to the end.

But now,

I sometimes catch you looking at me. You are thoughtful in your expression and you blush when I smile. What changed?

Did we just

switch places?