A Theory of Heartbreak
Asleep, he dreamed a universe of hills and ocean. Cartoon colour swam over synthetic orchestra pads in minor keys. A close, muted piano line narrated. A soft burnt orange, becoming translucent and then thickening again, dictated a passing of time.
Warm winds dug up the the air slowly and swept the landscape into motion. He wandered through valleys and glided across the top of hills. Yearning coloured the trees and desire quickened his steps. It felt like he was looking for something, and yet it also felt like he was completely free. He found a space that he immediately called his favourite, a hilltop nestled between others, and he stood there in the cartoon light with his hands on the top of his head.
After a moment of stillness, he turned towards where the sun was setting and she appeared, walking towards him. She was the most beautiful, the most perfect. Her hair caught the orange light and danced around her neck. Her eyes cut through his thinking and magnified the blue hues of his desire. Somehow, she seemed the centre and the force of all the things he could see.
She came close to him and stopped. It’s ok, she said.
As soon as he heard her speak, without warning, he started crying. Something secret between her beauty and her words had broken his heart. The burnt orange bled and thickened. The synthetic orchestra pressed deeper into the hills. The sky spiralled upwards, becoming more beautiful, more unreachable.
The warm air drifted past them and towards the ocean in the distance. He fell to his knees in tears and she met his woe with her hand on his. It’s ok, she said again.
He asked her, he pleaded with her, to forgive him. It felt desperate and it felt excruciating and he had to do it. Guilt poured into every leftover space in his flesh and he could not bury an inch of it. Her beauty drove it through his body, up his oesophagus and out of his mouth.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please, forgive me.
She smiled, told him she loved him, held his hand. She looked into his eyes until he looked back, and then led him along the surrealist landscape towards the ocean. They held hands as they walked, and the guilt gradually left him. He felt fragile, but he felt loved, like a child finally quiet in his mother’s arms after hours of weeping. He felt the weight of her beauty. He felt the burnt orange thinning out again and repeating its cycle.
The longing he felt was still there though, and still somehow painful, although in a different way. It was as if he couldn’t quite fully grasp the beauty in front of him, and therefore was infinitely far from its perfection. It was a depth of feeling he’d never known.
Beauty and pain. Beauty and pain. Life’s two pillars, intertwined.
As they climbed down the hillside and approached the shore, the dream ended and he awoke. Immediately a crushing heartbreak hit him. He sat up, his head in his hands. Imaginary world, imaginary people.
He couldn’t remember why he cried. He couldn’t remember what he was guilty of. But the longing; that was present still. It was more real than anything he had known. It was the only thing from the universe of hills and ocean that he now fully remembered and the only platform that was still his to explore. Only this pierced the void between asleep and awake.
The longing had stayed, yet she had gone. He would never see her face again, and that broke his heart.
There was no concept of before or after, he now realised. He just remembered being there. Colour had replaced time; imagination had replaced everything else. How can you recover, he thought, from a heartbreak that has no recourse to your history and no interaction with today? That might have been why it was so painful; it was forever and it ended.
