Holes In Your Heart
The hardest part of loving other people is the risk that one day, they will leave a hole in your heart. A hole shaped just like them. The kind of hole that can never be filled in exactly the same way by someone else. When it happens, the hole is capable of exploding your heart, shattering you in the process. And they won’t be there to help you pick up the pieces.
One day, the people we love will leave us. Or we will leave them, or some version of holes being carved into someone’s heart. Because that’s what it means to love. A piece of you lives and breathes with the heartbeat of another person. When that heartbeat stops, the piece of you stops too.
Somehow, you live on. In the beginning, you feel just as dead as the piece of you that stopped. But your lungs still fill with each breath and your heart keeps beating. You’re like a broken and crumbled candy bar still trapped in the wrapper. A shell, barely holding together a complete mess on the inside.
Life is more fragile than we care to acknowledge most of the time. It makes sense that we like to ignore that fact. It does us no good to spend all day wondering if this day will be our last. If this meal is the final one we will eat, or if we will see the the sun rise tomorrow. But, we will all have our last day at one point or another.
There’s a freedom in accepting that. You live differently once you learn, through holes in your heart, that you are never guaranteed the time you hope you get. You have no control over when your last conversation with someone you love will be. And when they’re gone, we wish for what we can never have. More time.
One more chance to tell them how special they are to us. We’d love to pull them in close for one more hug. Or have one more day to spend by their side. We tell ourselves that if we could just have one more day, or even a few hours, it would be enough. We just want one more chance to tell someone we love them. But one more day would never be enough.
In the beginning, the holes in your heart ache and crush you. Because how do you let someone go that took a part of you with them? It doesn’t take long to realize that you will never let them go completely, and that’s a heavy burden to live with. But somehow, you do.
With time, your grief doesn’t get easier. I’ve never understood when people say that it does. It doesn’t get easier, because the person that left a hole in your heart is still gone. They don’t get to come back, and you keep on breathing. It’s one of life’s strangest things.
Then there comes a day when your grief crashes over you and you think, ahhh there you are. You wrap yourself in it like a warm blanket, comforted that you still can miss someone that much after so much time has passed. Because as terrifying as a hole in your heart might be, time teaches you to fear that hole disappearing.
Sooner or later, we will each have our last day. In the meantime, we will say goodbye to people we love along the way. Each person who leaves us behind will carve a new hole in our heart. Time will keep passing, and we will learn to love the aches from all the holes in our heart. Because each ache belongs to someone we love who’s gone. And each time we feel the ache, we remember how alive they were. And how much we love them still.
We will never get all the time we’d like to have. But we do get the chance to show up, as often as we can, even when it’s inconvenient, for the people we love. Because the best part of loving other people is inviting them in and allowing them to take up space in your heart. It’s a risk of course. That one day they might leave a hole inside you, shaped just like them. A hole in your heart that will constantly remind you how much love brought, and can bring, to your life.
