Gone - Jim Chappell
What happens when someone you have loved for what seems like forever one day breaks your heart?
First, you are incredulous. You cannot believe that the rosy picture you have painted for the last few years has suddenly faded to black, leaving you in a deep and endless void. Is this even possible, you ask yourself. Thoughts of what you might have done or might not have done enough quickly flash through your mind like a torrential flood. Instinctively, you hold on for dear life because of fear of losing him completely.
Then, shock sets in. Not the mild, static-electricity kind of shock, but the mind-numbing, the-world-has-suddenly-stopped-revolving-so-let-the-earth-open-up-and-swallow-me-alive kind of shock.
Sages will nod their head, rub their chins, and say you are heartbroken. But when you closely examine the word `heartbroken' or its two components, `heart' and `break', you realize that the word is grossly inaccurate to describe what you feel. True, you feel a kind of pain in your heart and you think it's your heart breaking. But one's heart doesn't really break, does it? Something else does. Faith.
Don't get me wrong. You still believe in God or some Supreme Being that watches our every move. You still believe stealing or cheating is wrong.
What you stop believing in is the small things that you do, the small things that give meaning to your daily existence, the small things that actually matter. You begin to think, what's the point? Why wake up each morning? Why breathe? WHAT FOR?
When someone breaks your heart (nay, your faith), you stop believing and you switch off the lights inside your heart. It's like a house whose doors and windows are shut, but inside, someone is in the room farthest from the door, sitting or lying in the darkest corner, and that someone can't (or refuses to) hear anything. Friends, family, they call out to him from the door to `come out' (translation: `move on', or `forget the SOB') but he cannot see, he cannot acknowledge. He refuses to `come out'. He refuses to switch on the light or open a door or a window to let the sunshine in. He refuses to believe, deathly afraid that one day, he will again be `heartbroken' and will have to switch off the lights, and once more retreat into the darkest recess of his heart.
Why do I seem to know so much? Go figure…
