When a Heart Breaks

Love is weird.
At any given moment it can be: wonderful, terrible, mushy, aching, healing, hurtful, anxious, mournful, exciting, peaceful, traumatic, defining, re-defining, ooey-gooey-sappy, comfortable…the list goes on.
To put a definition on love is difficult. To say that you love someone is even harder.
People may look at me strangely when I say this, but for me, it’s true. Reality is, I’m not a trusting person. I keep up my guard, and believe me- don’t let the soft voice and passive personality fool you. I guard my heart like Fort Knox. To let someone in takes time. To open myself up to them in return takes even longer.
Trust is something that is forged over time. Welds are made slowly, a thoughtful surprise here, being cared for when you’re sick, talking through a disagreement, dealing together with a hurting heart. Each event brings you closer together and strengthens the joint.
However, life, or more accurately, I guess, the devil, deals in irony. He loves perversion. He takes the way things were beautifully created to work and warps them. What took time and work to bond together can suddenly be ripped apart in an instant. The bond of trust that was so carefuly forged is broken; violently shattered right in front of you.
And while this description may seem a little exaggerated, this is what it feels like. Scraps falling all around you, and you standing by, helpless to change the last thing you saw coming or wanted to happen.
And that’s when you realize. It didn’t happen in an instant. While you were carefully welding away, the one in whom you placed your trust was coming behind you with an angle grinder, undoing all you sought to accomplish. Oh, they didn’t knowingly do so. At least not in a deliberate sense. In their mind, they were trying to accomplish the same goal as you: a beautiful, seamless joint. But there was the one thing that they felt they couldn’t share. In all their urging and encouraging of your trust, they held one thing back. Hiding it -in shame- but hiding it nonetheless.
Then, one day, the explosion happens. The joint comes apart. And as you stand there in the settling dust, the truth comes out. The ugly truth. And it hurts. The lies, the hiding, all come to the surface. The questions begin. Quietly at first, filling your brain with the hurt, the insecurities, the self-blame, until they become so loud, that the lies are all you can hear, and you question if there ever really was truth. Is truth. Can be truth.