It isn’t a hidden fact that human relationships would be easier if we were well-prepared to face the possibility of being captured. If only there were a drug, some drawn out lines that you could follow because you knew that it was the only way to close your wounds. Like with injuries of the human body, a doctor with the right drugs, and instructions, can heal you, and as such it should occur for wounded souls as well. There should be a plan that would dictate step-by-step what you would need to do, and as such, you would pounce upon it, as if it were a lifeline, using it to replace the fragments of your torn heart. Even better -in a more utopian approach- a magical box which would return your emotional world back to the last state of calmness and through which you would come out unscathed from what looked like the battlefield of your feelings. It would be very convenient if things worked out this way. Instead we are left unable to help ourselves in the more usual of ways, and, in your head one question remains: how will you stop the pain?
The wounds of the heart differ from our physical ones, and maybe this is what causes them to be more resilient to healing. When you feel a wound opening and you turn towards it to have a look, you realise that there should be blood and yet there is only pain. It is an unbearable, raw, deep pain, that causes you to scream, cry, and suffocate. Your wounded heart erases its marks upon you and yet you continue to see them on your body. Every night -the number of which carries little meaning to you at this point- you find yourself in front of your mirror, which is anything but kind towards you. Every night that you again find yourself in front of the cold cut of glass, with your gaze fixed upon the form which it reflects within it. You are curious of every detail it holds. Of its width. Of every line and every curve it holds, and in doing so you fail to recognise yourself.
Reluctant in the face of an unknown entanglement of emotions and pain which spread to every cell of your body, you give in to your instincts which dictate you to try and save whatever you still can and in doing so resort to the simplest solution: faking it. You decide to force yourself into thinking that you don’t care anymore, that you don’t cry, and you don’t feel sorry. You bury inside you, as deep as you can, the pain, the depression, the rage, the despair, the frustration, whatever feelings are still left. You decide to hide them in a part of your mind that even you don’t have access to. To put a bandage on a wound that bleeds out uncontrollable pain and leave your wounded self hoping, hoping that if you stop looking at it, it will stop and ache. To close all that which you feel in a box and throw away the key in a drawer, hoping you forget it exists.
You do all this diligently, unlike you have ever done before. Maybe because deep inside you know that if all your feelings were to ever reappear in your hands, it would be a gun that could only mark you. And with the slightest of difficulties would make you pull this hypothetical trigger, opening all of which you had sealed away force and effort, simply so that you could see the good in all the evil of the things that hurt you again. You know however -or you will gradually understand- that denying the pain exists won’t pause the hurting. Maybe it will numb the wound? Yes. Maybe what you’ll feel is shrunken down as you use all your strength, your endurance, and even your skills to deceive yourself, those around you, your gods, and your demons, and to convince all of them that you are now healed, even if it is far from the truth. The question of how to stop the pain remains, lurking like a shadow over your head, threatening to devour you if you fail to find the answer.
Finally, as if it were an act of heroism for yourself, you decide to use the strongest power in existence: time. It allows you to believe in its ability -as though it were a magical doctor-, to heal even the deepest of wounds. In its ability to reconcile feelings with logic. In its ability to leave behind echoing voices, warm touches, the most honest looks you swear you have ever seen, hugs that were tighter than what you were prepared to endure at that moment in time. In its ability to rebuild you stronger than your pieces. You place all your hope in time and ask the bandage you had placed to pause its work, to fill with pain, and the box in which you had stacked carelessly all your feelings, to not open abruptly, hitting you in the face with the things you tried to leave behind.