When words make no sense, yet our hearts speak

Pain like it never was. Pain like rain on a sunny day. Pain like glass shattered in your face. Pain like it won’t go away.

That Conversation on the Train

“I hate it how he’s with her… he’s going to dance with her and sing with her… for the rest of the year… I can’t believe it’s over… he knows I’m the best thing that ever happened to him… but he’s gone with her.”

My heart agonises for the broken heart. She cannot escape the thoughts that plague her awareness. And there are ‘hims’ too. Many a heart is torched at the stake of betrayal.

And yet these experiences of living death seem to be the destiny of us all.

~

Think for a moment about the statement: “he knows I’m the best thing that ever happened to him…” 

What I hear in this statement is pain.

What is polarising about loss is the effect of sheer pain on the grieving person. There is absolutely no ability to see or think or say what makes sense. Because the heart is speaking.

The heart speaks a language in grief that seems to betray words, and if we only heard the words we would fail the heart, and the person.

The young woman who was grieving with her friend was genuinely forlorn like any of us when a relationship is no more. We think and say these kinds of things. They are our reality. I thought of the care in the person on the end of the phone she was speaking with; whether it is truth or not is irrelevant. In pain, there is permission to say what comes out and not be judged for it. In loss, not everything we say makes sense; lots of it doesn’t. And that’s okay.

Until we’ve been in a situation where our heads were that messed up that our words made no sense, our hearts haven’t truly spoken, for a broken heart is the reason the heart exists all alone to speak for itself. There is nothing left. No pretence, no bravado, no self-protection.

There is only one thing more beautiful than a heart broken that speaks its truth, albeit in forms that seem to betray the truth. That is, the person who cares on the other end of the line, or physically, as the face that greets the grieving one with a countenance willing to sit and silently mourn.

There are times when words make no sense, yet the heart speaks.

Photo by DAVIDCOHEN on Unsplash