Chapter Text
When someone you love dies, it leaves a hole in your heart.
That’s how everyone describes it, anyways. But eventually, the hole in your heart mends; if it didn’t, the blood loss would kill you. But the feelings start there and last a lifetime.
First and foremost comes the sense of longing for something you can’t have. Do you know the feeling when you're cold, and you imagine the feeling of being under a warm blanket? When you’re craving your favorite food so bad you feel like you could cry? When the want to be in the arms of your mom or your lover is the only thing that can occupy your mind, or when you’re exhausted and you long for your bed at the end of the day? That’s what it feels like; it’s the absence of something good, when something you desire with your entire being is just out of your reach. It feels as though you’ll return to it soon. But this absence is permanent.
And then comes the gnashing feeling of need. It follows the longing, really. The need for this person—to just see them, to touch them, to know they’re there—feels so intense it’s overwhelming. It feels like the itch of a bug’s bite that keeps you from sleeping with the desire to scratch your skin until it bleeds. It feels like the instinctive, jarring urge to jerk your hand away from a hot stove once you’ve gone and singed your skin. It feels like the white hot heat of your lungs begging for oxygen when you’re underwater. It feels like the dread and terror that rushes down your spine when the door shuts and you know nobody’s home. It feels like your body’s been expunged of any water within it, and your mouth and your lips and your throat are so dry that even a drop of water could save you. Just to touch them, to feel them breathing, to see them smile at you, without it being from behind the glass of a phone screen or through the shiny cast of a polaroid photo, could save you from the withered eternity that has become of you.
There are many things the human body can go without, and many things it cannot. The body can go without love just fine, but the mind craves even what it can never have back, even long after it’s gone, even when you’ve seen it carried away and witnessed its destruction.
The hole in my heart has healed just fine, but the scar throbs in pain with my heartbeat every day.