Broken
The music abruptly stops. The old samsung phone I use to play my music through a sound dock has been acting up. I think it has reached the end of its days. Something inside is broken perhaps, some circuit is shorted. It’s no exaggeration to say I’d be devastated if it gave up on me now. Loaded in its memory is the soundtrack to my day. I joke that on shuffle mode, it reads my mood in an eerie way. Please, not today. Die on a happy day. I’ll deal with it. But today, I need my music to see this through. A broken phone and a broken heart – too much to deal with. A broken heart sounds dramatic and needy but it definitely exists. The sense of heartbreak is lodged in the mind, though apparently it can have a physical effect on the organ it is attributed to. You can literally die of an arrested heart brought on by the stress of pain and grief and loss. I wonder how many heartbreaks it takes before that strong muscle simply gives up. And do the heartbreaks need to be big ones, the ones brought on by death of a loved one, for example? Or do many little ones count too? The bruises that go unnoticed, until one day…boom. It’s a toss up which is worse. The big tragedy or the myriad hurts. The tragedy happens and is done. The aftermath may be lifelong but the event itself? Just one moment. The little breaks are more insidious. Life can flow peaceful and easy, days pass in happiness and calm. But if your mind is vulnerable to that one provocation or trigger or person, you know it can only be so long before the next cut. It’s useless to put up defences. Or prepare for the inevitable bruising to come. It will bruise. It will hurt. It will break. A couple of days of shock, then the heart stands up, checks for missing bits, a deep breath and we live another day.
All things broken. Mending in odd, twisted ways, never quite the same again. Hearts and minds and music players. The logical step is to move on. Retire the phone, walk away from the trigger, focus on the happy things. But life and love aren’t logical. Do you know the art of Kintsugi or kintsukuroi? The Japanese mend broken ceramic bowls with a gold lacquer to remind them of its past and to trace the faultlines, now melded and made beautiful. That’s how broken hearts and minds can mend. Each bruise, each knock adds to the memory, the history. The damage is real but so is the learning. You can choose to hide the broken bits from the light or you can make them beautiful.