heartbreak

What Karen wants to do - needs to do - is cry, but she can't. Here, alone, when she could howl, beat the sofa cushions, scream; now, somehow, she is unable. It's for fear that if she gives in to it, she'll lose all sense of who she is. She is afraid that if she falls apart in private, then she'll fall apart completely. That if she crumbles, like a house in an earthquake, she will disappear down some deep, dark crevasse, and never be able to pull herself out and put herself back together again.

I wish I believed him. He's looking at me like he can see where I begin.

Someday you will wake up feeling 51 percent happy and slowly, molecule by molecule, you will feel like yourself again.

An English teacher at school once said to her, 'Alice, one thing I hope you never find out is that a broken heart hurts physically.' Nothing she has ever experienced has prepared her for the pain of this. Most of the time her heart feels as though it's waterlogged and her ribcage, her arms, her back, her temples, her legs all ache in a dull, persistent way: but at times like this the incredulity and the appalling irreversibility of what has happened cripple her with a pain so bad she often doesn't speak for days.

All I was aware of was this hole, this gaping hole where my heart should have been. I read somewhere once that your heart is supposed to be the same size as your clenched fist, but this hole felt far bigger. It seemed to expand over my whole upper body and it felt cold, vacant - the cooling wind seemed to cut right through it. I felt frail and insubstantial, as if the wind could have blown me away.

Take heart now in one true thing: You will gain traction. You will grow upwards even when you think you__e been slammed back down into that same dark hole. It will start looking like a different hole, one that might still have youcurled up and crying, but that crying will be more transformative than only desperate screams of despair. Your pain can be turned to good account. You__e not alone. You__e gotthis handbook. Keep us with you.

And yes, being lovesick is like being in mourning. Because you die, because your future dies and you with it...There is a hurting time. It lasts for so long. But it gets better. I know that now.

Nothing big ever happens, good or bad, unless the floor falls out first.Let your longing wind you down through that spiral. And know that falling can be the most wickedly awesome and totally safe thing you__e ever done. Down, down, down, because when you hit that solid ground you__l know.You might touch down softly, or you might land in an ungraceful thud. But land you will and when you__e ready, you can stretch your shaky legs, dust yourself off tossing your head back to the heavens and proclaim __ere I am! All that I am, and all that I will be.__nd your heart will still love what it loves. And you will remember that was good in you, and in her. And these memories will comfort and will serve you as you move through life, open to love _ wherever and whenever it finds you.

Suffering is so real & I walk amongst so many who have no idea how much my soul is aching to be healed.

She put her head in her hands and began to cry softly. He felt confused and bitterly unhappy. A part of him wanted to go to her, to hold and comfort her, but he wasn__ prepared to be pushed away in cold anger all over again. He waited in his chair and felt the room expand until there was an emptiness the size of the desert between them.

The only way out is through

One celestial quake and the timeline belonging to her had imploded in the heavens like a dying star. It was like falling into oblivion, she thought wearily, the tattered remains of her life floated__nanchored in a vacuum of what was and what little remained.

I was tired of well-meaning folks, telling me it was time I got over being heartbroke. When somebody tells you that, a little bell ought to ding in your mind. Some people don't know grief from garlic grits. There's somethings a body ain't meant to get over. No I'm not suggesting you wallow in sorrow, or let it drag on; no I am just saying it never really goes away. (A death in the family) is like having a pile of rocks dumped in your front yard. Every day you walk out and see them rocks. They're sharp and ugly and heavy. You just learn to live around them the best way you can. Some people plant moss or ivy; some leave it be. Some folks take the rocks one by one, and build a wall.

They always prided themselves on looking youthful. __orty__ the new thirty,_ they__ joke.Until heartbreak and grief enter your life, and then forty__ the new one hundred.

Losing him was like having a hole shot straight through me, a painful, constant reminder, an absence I could never fill.

It's like she has her heart in her hand and it's broken. She's holding it out and showing me all the little pieces. Or maybe it's my heart.

I knew it would be all of those things and so much more to me, but it was his heart I was yanking from his chest with my decision, and that__ what mattered to me. I was giving up a piece of my own as well, but it was a choice. His was just collateral.

I found that the only way I could control this sorrow was not to think of [it] at all, which was almost as painful as the loss itself.