The exact moment you are waking up from your broken heart is as always around the corner

By Massimo Usai

A Short Story in the Middle of My Mind About a Broken Heart

Last December the air was so cold that he got back into bed and lay against her, borrowing the warmth of her body to warm his own.

Being in bed with her was when he was happiest.

When she left for work in the morning, the separation anxiety came. He knew it wasn’t sane, wasn’t normal. But it was what it was.

When she was beside him, her presence alone calmed him. She would spend hours listening to all his worries, helping him make sense of everything.

God, last December had been a different thing. He had cooked her Christmas dinner and opened a good bottle of red, and early in the day they ate the pudding they had bought at the delicatessen at the end of the road. Afterwards he made the coffee, and they were smiling, and they were happy.

Now he doesn’t want to grow old. He doesn’t wish to reach eighty. He doesn’t see the point anymore.

When he met one of his old lovers the other night, he noticed she was glad to see him. It was a good chance to put his mind somewhere else. When you have a broken heart, your mind doesn’t respond very well.

A friend had told him, last year, that she still had a soft spot for him. He only smiled, said a few words, and walked away — because her face came back into his mind. He is not the kind of man who goes looking for company when he is down or missing someone, so he went home after a single glass of wine with a close friend at the pub next to his flat.

At four in the morning he found himself looking through her pictures, thinking he still loved her the way he had the night they met at the concert. The way he always had.

Everything fades, people keep saying to him. He isn’t sure they’re right. They don’t know exactly how he feels. To say I love you, I love you, I love you to someone else makes no sense to him anymore.

The power of love is a curious thing. Some men weep, some sing all the time. You don’t need a full credit card to ride this train; it’s a beautiful trip, and it’s free. Sometimes you feel happy, sometimes sad, and at some point you find yourself furious. You want to jump down out of this life, and in the same breath you want to find a new love and burn yourself again. So you hold tight to the feeling, knowing you could be hurt — but you keep running, because you know it’s your nature to run, and to feel the pain.

And when finally everything turns cruel and you want only to die — you don’t. You start to think about the next step, even when you feel you have no right to take it.

You once wished to grow old with her. Now you don’t want to grow at all. You want to stop everything, set a limit on your own life. Start to wish you won’t get too old.

But you weren’t built to be old one day, and the moment you understand that, you’ll smile again. You just need a new game. You stopped playing because you grew old — or maybe you grew old because you stopped playing. He could never decide which way the line went.

He carried all of it in his mind for days, for weeks, and then one day he came out of it.

He went to the cinema alone. An action film, something to keep his mind away. Afterwards he walked back through the streets, in the middle of all the people, watching them without any hard feeling.

At one point he decided to sit in a coffee place; he didn’t feel comfortable going into a pub on his own.

She was sitting there, a big shapeless bag on the seat beside her. No phone on the table — only a notebook she was writing in. Curiosity isn’t only a thing for girls; boys get it too.

She was writing a list of her favourite films. She meant to send it to some of her girlfriends, which seemed to him a good enough reason to start a conversation.

A few hours later they kissed, looking out at the city from the terrace at the edge of the old town. The evening shone with starlight, clear on that cloudless night.

The next day they walked into the centre, had another coffee, spent time in the park, and went again to the cinema — to see Motherless Brooklyn, a modern noir, in a beautiful vintage hall with décor untouched since the fifties.

He felt comfortable there, and for the first time he wasn’t shy about holding her hand through the film.

When Thom Yorke’s voice came in over the soundtrack, he finally understood he was happy to play this game called love again. He understood he was about to stop becoming old, one more time.

Life was smiling at him again.

His broken heart was already a far-away memory.