“Where do the pieces go?”, she asked all of a sudden.
“What pieces?”
“Pieces of the heart. Where do they go? How much of ourselves do we lose with every missing piece? Tell me for God’s sake!”, she yelled with tears streaming down her face, “I just want them back”, she then whispered, “I just want to feel whole again…”
And I think a few pieces of my heart disappeared somewhere. Sometimes we find comfort in silence, in the calm after the storm. Sometimes when we are so tired of chasing the answer, we actually realize we never asked the right question. My God, we may even forget the question, or worse, forget to ask it in the first place. And that is why there are battles we never win, because we do not know how to fight them, and there are answers we are never satisfied with, because we do not really know what we are looking for…I used to think the pieces only go missing when our hearts get broken, and to believe the idea of the whole thing as a terrible loss. But then I somehow realized we lose those parts of ourselves in the very beginning, before any heartbreak, and we do not actually lose them, we exchange them.
What if it goes like that, that with every encounter with someone, we exchange pieces of our hearts with theirs? What if we never lose them, that we just lend them to someone who needed that one piece that changes everything? And what we take back might not necessarily be equal to what we gave, but it is just what we needed as well. What if the whole process is about gaining, about accepting pieces that are not ours yet it is us they belong to?I think our hearts were made to be broken and the pieces are meant to wander around between us leaving a different impact within each of us. I think we have to let go of some pieces in order to feel whole again, not incomplete, in order to leave some space for something we could not clearly see, in order to remind ourselves that we do not need to gather up the pieces after a heartbreak, we do not need to search outside ourselves for what we think went missing, but rather look inside.
Look closely. Look at the spaces in your heart. Look at that tiny space that used to hold a piece of your own. Does it seem empty to you? Does it mean you lost a part of yourself you can never get back, or does it actually bring you closer to the things you could never find before your heart was broken?
I always wondered why people always defined heartbreak. Like heartbreak is the end of a relationship. Heartbreak is an unreturned love. Heartbreak comes with lying, with cheating, with grief, and with death. But we forget that heartbreak also comes with life, with perfect love, and with joy.
Heartbreak has no definition and no limit.
Our hearts may break with a love so great we never thought would find us, with a song that explains all what we couldn’t find words to say, with our finger between a baby’s tiny hand, with a simple gift at the very right time. See, heartbreak also comes with hope, with gratitude, with the presence of someone, not only their absence. Heartbreak comes with sunrise and with sunset.
In all its forms, our hearts burst open to let some light in, to experience more of life’s wonders, to enjoy and appreciate its beauty, to learn, to love, and to live.
So after a long silence I manage to say, “The pieces do not go anywhere. They are always there, taking different forms, touching some lives. They represent your encounters with everyone and everything around you, and even if some days it feels some are missing, they will always come back, bringing about a new vision, a new tale…”
And I realized those few pieces of mine did not disappear, she has them now. I guess she realized it too because she smiled, so I also smiled and said, “We never lose the pieces of our hearts…”
- Nada Mohamed
You can follow more of her works
on her blog – Attraversiamo
or her Facebook Page – Little Things
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