Leaving My Heart Open

Notes on heartbreak, from the French/Swiss border

None of us are strangers to heartbreak. In today’s times, an instantaneous flood of tragedy breaks as soon as we unlock our phones, through the veins of our fingertips that lead directly to the heart. We each hold a piece of the world’s grief in our hands. Sometimes this can make us recognise the heaviness of our own, what we carry without realising. More often than not, we have to grapple with the pain of letting go of something that could’ve been, or something that was but no longer is. Of course, there are the big things: passed family members, break-ups, friends we lost contact with, past versions of ourselves. But, in between, there are several smaller things: job rejections, bad grades, cancelled plans. And the smallest things, which are subtle, but plenty: burning your dinner, getting catcalled, when you plan a picnic and it rains. There are things we forget and things we don’t. All of them have weight, regardless.

One of my favorite poems of the modern age is “Meditations in an Emergency” by Cameron Awkward-Rich:

I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & 
the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I 
ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in 
Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents 
beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old 
women hawking roses, & children all of them,
break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I 
love the world. I run from end to end like fingers 
through her hair. There are no borders, only wind. 
Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the 
institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand 
on my stupid heart.

There are two ways the heart can break: it can break apart or it can break open. I have slowly begun to notice the difference as I’ve spent the last few months experiencing both, simultaneously. The former was a result of London’s rental crises, leaving my new roommate (and great friend of 11 years) and me at a complete loss after 3, 5, 10, 12 offers spread out over three months. It started to feel personal. I grew exhausted and floated farther and farther away from myself. There was little I enjoyed. Hopelessness, while related to something I knew would inevitably sort itself out, stretched across my life like fog, clouds settling over mountains. Yet, in the thick of it, at the beginning of September, I graduated from university. I felt so vulnerable to the future, chest wide open: look, here is my heart. Come and take it. Perhaps it was that cavity in my chest that made me not only more sensitive to pain but to love and joy too. My parents visited my flat for the first time since I moved in. I got to make them tea, and I welled up a little in the kitchen, hearing the echo of their voices in a place that was so quiet for so long. My heart was so tender and supple. How can I salvage it? How can I keep it from eroding, like a cliff beaten down by waves?

by Ariel Lee

Louise Eldrich wrote in The Painted Drum:

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

Eldrich speaks of a reality that I have come to face as I bridge the gap between adolescence and adulthood: academia can no longer serve as a distraction. The working world provides flexibility and isolation that I am still getting used to — one that forces me to sign off Slack at 5 pm on Thursdays and sit with my feelings until Monday morning. As I dealt with my first real adult crisis, I felt the shock of confrontation, like opening a freezer on the hottest day of the year. Maybe, in that sense, that shock was relief in disguise.

How exhausting is adulthood, how inevitable is heartbreak. Sensitivity is a virtue, a tool to transform survival into life. And how sweet it is to recognise the difference, to not just surpass the pain of heartbreak, but to counteract it with moments of joy. Let the sun illuminate the tips of the waves and the peaks of the mountains, dripping like sweet honey onto the earth so that the world looks golden. If only for a moment.

Mary Oliver writes in her heart-wrenching poem “Lead”:

I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

I arrived in Switzerland open-hearted and porous, oxidising with the mountain air. I take my walks down to the lake, passing fields with sunflowers and cows, whose bells ring across the silence of a weekday afternoon, save for the rustling of yellowing autumn leaves. I sit on the fishing dock and watch the willow tree sway, in rhythm with the lapping of the waves. I let my heart unfold into the echoes of the world. Things are slowly working themselves out. The self that floated away from me is slotting into place once again.

The times are heavy and we are, sometimes, very fragile. But to leave your heart open is anything but weak. It makes way for softness, for tenderness, like ageing leather. There are ways to retain a supple heart against the weathering of the world — perhaps it doesn’t involve reparation and closure, but more a realisation that with each crack and fold comes a greater capacity to love.

---

These days I am trying to live life deeper, slower, and more intentionally. Without London’s smog, I feel better exposed to the sweetnesses of life: my aunt’s cat, fresh croissants, the blue shadows of the mountains. Regardless: every day I am humbled by my attempts at speaking French, and my sloppy Google searches for how to say fulfilled/refreshed/embarrassed/regretful in persian text to speech. But I am finding ways to get around it, and my resilience is vitalised by the kindness of my family, my friends, and strangers (and also, maybe, the abundance of baked goods I am consuming).

I hope this is the start of the rest of my life.

Much love,

<3

Tara

P.S. The Devotions playlist has been updated with some recent favorites :-)