Bette Davis said, "Pleasure of love lasts a moment. Pain of love lasts a lifetime."
Heartbreak is like having a broken heart, you can fix it all you want but you can never erase the scars. And being heartbroken because of betrayal? Well that's like having your heart broken and poisoned - even if the scars diminish with time, the poison stays. It might stop hurting, but the reminder will always be there.
And as someone who's been a recipient of this poison, I can vouch for it to be the most numbingly painful thing ever.
A loved one recently asked me if I feel angry on the person who betrayed me and broke my heart. To my own surprise, I wasn't angry. I was just in pain. It took me a while to figure out my own emotions, but then it hit me - the pain I felt from the heartbreak overpowered the anger I felt over the betrayal. As angry as I might have been, I was just too hurt to feel it. And as I say this out loud, I hear how confusingly stupid it sounds.
But, it is what it is.
When I look back to the initial days after the heartbreak, I think of it as a grieving period I gave myself, to mourn the death of something so dear to me. And while it all seemed to remain completely stagnant in the moment, in reality - I changed and grew and evolved.
All this while, when I thought I was only grieving, I was growing. And I cannot stress enough on how wonderful it feels. It's like you take up a long trek with a friend, and believe it's going to be a long way before you reach the top, until one day you wake up and look down, only to realize how far you've come. All this time you thought you were miles from where you needed to be, you forgot to credit yourself for how far you've come.
Love may have wounded my spirits, but it also protected my capability to get better, to get stronger, to finally heal.
After all, the very emotion that can break your heart more often than not is the one to heal it.
You know how when people think love, they think of it to be all butterflies and rainbows. They believe it to be the answer to their prayers and the thing that makes life worth living. Love for them, triumphs all. It always wins. It makes the flowers smell sweeter and the songs seem deeper. It gives meaning to art and depth to the mundane.
And I want to believe all of this. I want to believe in love and its magic, I want it to be unicorns and fairy dust. It's said that grief is the price we pay for love and if that's the case, I so hope to God, please let this be my down payment.
