On the long, dark silence

It's funny. I've always wondered what it would be like if I experienced heartbreak. In my classically asinine way, I thought it come in handy for my acting. You encounter the proverbial heartbreak all the time in fiction: you can read it in any number of books, see it in any number of movies and TV shows. People say that it feels like time is slowing down, and all you can do is just lie back on your bed, feeling the silence press down around you and the little shards working their way around the left side of your chest, watching the time crawl and wondering when or if you're going to start healing again. And all the while you're prodding the wound by thinking about him, because you can't help it. Which of course only makes it hurt more.

Yeah. It's like that.

It's helpful, in a way, that so much of my personality comes from my head, and that I'm so used to internalizing my emotions. A huge part of me is sort of standing to one side, looking at myself, and saying in a clinical, if vaguely fatherly, tone, "Yes, it hurts. You knew it would hurt, in fact. You accepted it as a part of life, because that's what you've learned from all your experiences thus far. But you're going to get through it, because you're far too genre-savvy not to. Heartbreak ends eventually, pain can only last so long, and one day you're going to smile and mean it again." I can distance myself from the hurt. I have experience at it. And I know what the cerebral part of me says is true.

Then there's the other part of me. The one that wants to huddle into a ball, scrape my fingers down my arms until the physical pain overwhelms the emotional one, and scream until it stops. The part that knows only how much it hurts right now, and knows that it's only going to get worse before it gets better, and is terrified because he's woefully unprepared to deal with it. That part is looking ahead and seeing this long march of endless months, in which he's trying to get used to this aching absence, and he kind of wants to bury himself in the back yard and never wake up again.

I'm vaguely disturbed that that part is referring to himself in the third person. I'm apparently either much better at distancing myself than I expected, or this is the beginning of some sort of funky sci-fi story where I get to play the tragic, damaged, yet horrendously powerful main villain. I kinda hope I get nifty psychic powers out of it. ULTRA DOUBLE MINORITY PSYCHIC CRUSH PEER PRESSURE ATTACK! Except I'm sort of lacking my partner for that. Which is the whole point of this post.

Well, I feel a little better. I think I'm going to try to adopt a stance where my self-esteem, sense of accomplishment as a human being, and general state of well-being doesn't depend upon whether or not I'm attached at the hip to another person. I'm aware that's easier said than done, and I think accomplishing that would probably require a certain insane megalomania on my part, but hey - all worthwhile endeavors require a little effort and sacrifice, right?