heart broken

2010.3.27 (ramble)

He told me that he’d never had his heart broken.

           

            “Not once?”

            “Nope.”

            “How is that possible?”

It was our second date, and I wasn’t thinking of staying around for many – if any – more until I heard him say those words. He wasn’t incredibly young, and it wasn’t like he was inexperienced in the matters of love and romance, but the complex matter of having a broken heart never once happened to him – I was immediately captivated.

To be honest, I was titillated by the idea of me being the one to break his heart. I had just come out of a recent string of heart breakings; my serious boyfriend of many years had ended things months prior with the devastating phrase, It’s not you, it’s me and ran off to Spain to “find himself” in the arms of some exotic senorita; then my beloved aunt passed away suddenly, leaving the family without so much as a “good-bye” or any answers to my infinite Why?s; and to top things off, the dream position that I finally attained within my marketing firm was dissolved with the department overnight. I was a shattered mess for months, and it wasn’t until weeks before I met Z that I finally felt like I was able to pick up pieces and begin to move on. 

I thought it was what I needed to break his heart in order to heal mine; to cause someone unbearable pain and suffering to mend my own wounds. When the idea first occurred, it seemed like something out of Greek mythology, a goddess who grew strength from the agony and misery of men she broke.

            “You’ve never had your heart broken?”

            He chuckled as if he couldn’t understand what was so complicated about my inability to understand. “No. Never.”

            “Have you ever been in love?”

            “Plenty of times.”

            “What about when it ended? Weren’t you hurt?”

            “Most of the time I just got bored, or things just faded off on their own – mutually.”

            “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

            “I don’t understand why you’re having such a hard time with this?”

In brief detail I explained my recent string of events to him.

            “No one you’ve loved has ever died?”

            “No. I guess I’ve been blessed in that way.”

The more he spoke, the more I wanted to be the one to initiate him into the real world, the world where people lived and died, loved and lost.

He would always say the most ridiculous things out of nowhere. One night we had a discussion based on his claim that all writers were simply good liars and nothing more.

There was something about this man, besides the fact that he had never had his heart broken. He was an enigma, pure, simple and straight. The more I got to know him, the more I didn’t understand what it was I learned.

Things became comfortable, and there I was, in a relationship that I never wanted to be in in the first place, but I found myself happy more often than not.

In the end he was left unscathed, and I again was left to heal alone with another broken heart.