Break Your Heart Early in Life…or Else

This next period will be the storm.

Putting off the pain is useless. I know that now. To be clear, this last year represented the first time I felt the emotion named love in my entire life.

I wish I were kidding.

Alas, I’m not. I’m 42, and I’m a broken-heart virgin. Were you to offer me a brutal beatdown at the hands of twenty strangers, a hundred whip lashes, a week without food naked in the wild…I would take it. God, would I ever. If it meant I didn’t have to feel this any longer. If some thunderbolt from above were capable of striking me tomorrow, filling me with days of writhing on the ground in agony, I would accept it in place of this…thing. This feeling. This not so small death.

I want to stop talking about it. Stop writing about it. Stop thinking about it. I want someone to punch me in the teeth and drive it out of my skull.

Alas. I’ll have to endure it old school.

Most people suffer their first love as youths. As teenagers. As kids. During a time when emotions are bigger, but recoveries are faster.

Not I.

I waited forty-two years. I waited until all of me was formed, structured, solidified in stone. And, in hindsight, it was way too long. All my previous romantic collisions ended merrily, passively, amicably.

I wish not.

I wish they’d have ended horribly. With gut-shots. With hearts removed and insides turned out. Because then…and only then…would I have been prepared for the brutality of it all. Only then would I have been ready.

I wasn’t prepared for this. For the lies. For the indifference. For the absolute cut-throatery of it all. I didn’t understand. I didn’t know.

Ignorance is bliss, they say.

No words are truer.

I don’t want to die. Hell no. Never that. Never the end. I have too much to do. Too many things needing finishing. Too many living things which rely on my small existence.

But…

A part of me has been excised. Removed. Surgically chopped out. And because of my inexperience, because of my ignorance, it was more or less like losing a limb or three. And unlike my younger counterparts, this won’t swiftly heal. No chance. I fell into a hole from which there is no climbing out. I burn in a flame which never self-extinguishes.

Dumbass. Me. Ignorance is no excuse.

Jesus Christ. I want to stop writing about this. Where are the good days? What happened to the ‘I’m just excited to be alive’ days? What the F am I doing living in a haze, stranded on an emotional island, perpetually thinking about someone who doesn’t exist? Why?

Weak…it is. Pathetic. And yet here I am. Beating the ever-loving pulp out of myself. And for what? There is no reason.

Thunderbolt, I await you. If ever, now is the time. Better death than this. Better unbearable weeks of physical agony. I would suffer it all…just to drive this feeling away.

Please?

Is this poetry?

Or reality?

You decide.