Heartache, Letting Go and Some Things Even A Mother’s Love Can’t Heal

As you grow older, you discover that there are some heartaches that even a mother’s love finds hard to heal. They just have to be lived through.

I’m at an age where the idea of a significant other piques all interest. A few mornings back, I spilled the matters of my heart in a tearful tryst to my mother over breakfast. I remember that day as if it were yesterday.

It wasn’t an early morning as such; I wore my pencil skirt, dressed up as a young, modern and ambitious woman, lined my eyes with the signs of sleepless nights and carried my bruised heart in my chest. It was not a pretty sight, I daresay.

Believe me, in my pain, my mother saw her helplessness in cushioning this blow. I mean it’s personal, so personal, that even a mother can’t fix it or reverse the pain.

I was well aware that this information would only be a secret from my father for only a few hours. Just as I knew, the knock on my bedroom door had the same ring as I expected. He tries to mince his words, treading carefully and that was more than enough for my emotions to flare up. ‘I know what it feels like,’ he says.

Human suffering and misery, are great narrators. Regardless of volume.

In this same predictable misery, I let myself be swept by the tides till the corners of my eyes let salty water seep from them. That my friends, is the inevitable hurt you would carry if you experienced a mature split.

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There’s no tragedy, there’s no catastrophe, there’s no massive blow-up that burnt what was to smithereens. It’s a weight I carry within myself that gets heavier on me by nighttime, before I think of falling into dreamless sleep. It’s almost as if the door is not entirely shut, the feelings are still a flame and the ache intensifies.

With every passing day, it got worse rather than getting any easier. Selfish reasons or for a general good? I still don’t seem to know.

Not an hour has passed by since that day, that hasn’t perplexed me at the sudden halt of what I deemed as perfect. A vision that I unfortunately couldn’t transfer to the one I talk about and that bothers me as my shortcoming. Circumstantial or not meant to be, these are different lenses you could look through. Neither diminishes nor remotely minimizes the pain. It’s still hazy in my heart and mind.

There’s no going back. There’s no hoping.

There’s not a trace left. With this new void, I take a day at a time, half praying for a solution and with a teensy desire for the lost happiness to find a way back to me someday.

“Have a good day, and don’t be sad. Great things await you,” my mother chimes in every morning when I’m bolting for work.

Helplessly, my family tries to behave normally around me, though there’s a certain silence lulled by helplessness. I see them stealing glances, under the impression that I don’t notice.

I failed.

In this battle of heart and mind, practical and romantic, what we seemed to have felt is a collective let down; that what meant so much to their oldest, was faceless to them, yet wholeheartedly accepted for the happiness of their one and only.

That’s where I failed.

I have no face to show and no emotions to curtain. It feels like a raw wound, sore from even the slightest wind’s grazing.

What I know for certain is that despite the turmoil, this brief episode that I hold on to so dearly is by far the best I had; and by far the most disappointing at the same time.

Top image via Pixabay

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