seasonal heartbreak

So, yes, there is such thing as an actual broken heart, and although I do not see wikipedia as a reliable source (I don't), it's a jumping off point for research.  I also know you can die of a broken heart.

But my question was this: could a trauma, even a relatively small one, haunt you, a year or so later?  Could a heartbreak follow you and sadden you from the year before at the same time of year, even if you had largely gotten over the event (or thought you had)?

The anniversary of sadness.

Other heartbreaks.

I occasionally worry about my heart.  The Dr. said with that the cause of my PTSD, it was like it had flicked a switch on my adrenaline that could not be turned off again.  So that I was ready for fight or flight all the time.  I find this most disturbing when I am going to sleep.  There I am, sometimes alone, sometimes in the arms of my loved one, and my heart begins to race.  My mind and my heart gallop away and I have no control over them.  Internal Tourettes, perhaps.

I often think on this quote:
"The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.'  People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole?  The Platonic union of souls?  I think otherwise.  I think you're whole before you begin.  And the love fractures you.  You're whole and then you're cracked open."
Philip Roth, The Dying Animal

I'm not sure that I agree with it, but I think on it, particularly when putting together this entry on heartbreak.  I'm posting this, but I'm still thinking on it...

Drowning.

Stevie Smith - Not Waving But Drowning
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

 (source)

Wretched Woman!

I've been thinking about this letter since I read it.

(source)
Jermain Wesley Loguen (Jarm Logue) fled his enslavement, regrettably leaving behind his mother and siblings.  His former owner's wife wrote him to tell him that they were encountering hard times and to ask him to pay her for his freedom as he was a thief who stole himself.  Not only this, but telling him that circumstances had led her to sell his siblings away.

His reply is what I have been thinking on these last few days.  For those of us who struggle to find the right words when confronted with a bully and/or a horrible situation, Rev. Loguen wrote with grace and authority, saying exactly what one wishes he would have.

Words

Words

from "The Face of the Horse" by Nikolai Alekseevich Zabolotsky
"Then we should hear words.
Words as large as apples. Thick
as honey or buttermilk.
Words which penetrate like flame
And, once within the soul, like fire in some hut,
Illuminate its wretched trappings.
Words which do not die
And which we celebrate in song."

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, p. 238.
"She has always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent on emotions like sticks in water."

A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous

p. 189 "Poor words, you do not suffice."

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

p. 231  "The words of her husband in praise of her meant nothing. But I am a man whose life in many ways, even as an explorer, has been governed by words. By rumors and legends. Charted things. Shards written down. The tact of words. In the desert to repeat something would be to fling more water into the earth. Here nuance took you a hundred miles."

 source

 

Perception

Atonement by Ian McEwan, p. 103.

"No one in her family, however, noticed the transformation in her, and she was not able to resist the power of their habitual expectations."

My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd, p. 124.

"How do you begin to transpose one experience into the 'normality' of another? How can you even expect those at home to understand? Should you even want them to? Why start pushing the damage you shoulder through choice onto the lives of those close to you at home?"

Cowardice

The Book Thief by Zusak

p. 115

"is there cowardice in the acknowledgement of fear? Is there cowardice in being glad that you lived?"

Blindfold and Alone by Corns and Hughes-Wilson

p. 48

"Fear, panic, terror- all go into the equation of 'cowardice'. It is perhaps the outcome that is the true arbiter of cowardice, such as refusing to obey the order to attack, or running away in fear. Cowardice is in fact the individual's reaction to his (very natural) fear, not the fear itself, despite its only too obvious manifestation. Fear is not cowardice."

The Dangers of Memory

When I Forgot by Elina Hirvonen

p. 5

"Memory is one of life's burdens that we can do nothing about."

The Ministry of Pain by Ugresic

p. 210

"There is no such things as mercy, no such things as compassion; there is only forgetting; there is only humiliation and the pain of endless memory."

The Dangers of Nostalgia

Dangers of Nostalgia

"Nostalgia" is so often said with that sort of simpering, "good ol' days", harkening back to the time when things were simple and clean and wonderful. They never tell you about the dangers of Nostalgia, the pain that blind-sides you, the hurt that hunts you down in your beautiful, mundane life and sticks a fork in your hand, heart or eye and says, "you think you control your memory but really your memory controls you." Maybe you should think of Nostalgia as a brother to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The way that the memory is triggered has to be similar; smell, sound, sight. Although some find a relief or a release in Nostalgia, there are others who find it like being mugged by their memory, their carefully constructed piece of mind stolen and them left bereft, shaking.

The Ministry of Pain- Ugresic

p. 226

"Words like 'phantom limb syndrom' or 'nostalgia' are arbitrary lexical labels meant to denote the complex emotional blow that comes of loss and the impossibility of return. They imply that it makes virtually no difference whether we make our peace with the loss or experience relief at being able to let go of the past or of the desire to return to it. Because the blow does not lose its intensity thereby. Nostalgia, if that's the word for it, is a brutal, insidious assailant who favours the ambush approach, who attacks when we least expect him and goes straight for the solar plexus. Nostalgia always wears a mask and, o irony of ironies, we are only its chance victim. Nostalgia makes its appearance in translation- most often a bad one- after a complicated journey not unlike the children's game 'telephone'. The phrase the first player whispers into the ear next to him passes through a whole chain of ears until it emerges from the mouth of the last player like a rabbit from a hat."

After the First World War

Writing Scotland: How Scotland’s Writers Shaped the Nation
author: Carl MacDougall
Polygon, Edinburgh, 2004

p. 96
The play [Peter Pan] was a huge success and has been adapted for various media many times, most familiarly in the Disney versions. But ten years after it was premiered, the generation who grew up with Peter’s cheery notion that ‘death is an awfully big adventure’ found [p. 97] themselves marching off to the battlefields of the First World War. Off-duty soldiers drew comfort from Never Land, a place of eternal childhood. The adventure of death- the greatest adventure of all- would have guaranteed eternal youth, a consolation many soldiers must have carried with them when they faced the guns.
The line was removed after the war.”

Slinkachu, "Scars", London
source

Integrations- Pablo Neruda

Integrations

After everything,
I will love you
As if it were always before


As if, after so much waiting,
Not seeing you
And you not coming,
You were breathing close to me forever.


Close to me with your habits,
With your colour and your guitar
Just as countries unite
In school room lectures,
And two regions become blurred
And there is a river near a river
And two volcanoes grow together.


Close to you is close to me
And your absence is far from everything
And the moon is the colour of clay
In the night of quaking earth
When, in terror of the earth,
All the roots join together
And silence is heard ringing
With the music of fright


Fear is also a street
And among its trembling stones
Tenderness somehow is able
To march with four feet
And four lips


Since without leaving the present
That is a fragile thing
We touch the sand of yesterday
And in the sea
Love reveals a repeated fury

-- Pablo Neruda

Before, during, and after.

Before, during, and after.
It's true that you never look the same after something happens.  PTSD changes the way your brain works, why shouldn't it change the way your face looks? Some people say they can tell differences in before and after photographs of me.
I rarely show anyone before photographs. 

Tim Hetherington
His photos kind of broke me.  I've never been able to scream after what happened to me, except for in my sleep.  This is what I always wanted to do. 

fine/nothing

How often is feeling fine really the absence of feeling anything?
Feeling fine.

Potential Loves

Potential, as in latent, as in unawakened or unrealised.

"Hunger for the other person, the lure of their hidden depths. But once their secret has been decoded, along come these words, often pretentious and dogmatic, dissecting, pinpointing, categorizing. It all becomes comprehensible, reassuring. Now the routine of a relationship, or of indifference, can take over. The other one's mystery has been tamed. Their body reduced to a flesh and blood mechanism, desirable or otherwise. Their heart to a set of predictable responses.
At this stage a kind of murder occurs, for we kill this being of infinite and inexhaustable potential that we have encountered. We would rather deal with a verbal construct than a living person..."
Andrei Makine, "The Woman Who Waited", p. 3.


Tiutchev- "O, how our love is murderous"

"O, how our love is murderous,
The dearer something is to us
The surer are we to destroy it
In passion's savage blindness!
Was it so long ago you said,
Proud of your victory: she's mine . . .
Barely a year gone - stop and think,
What has remained of her?
Where are the roses in her cheeks,
Her smiling lips and shining eyes?
Rivers of scalding tears
Have scorched and burned them all.
Do you remember how you met,
Your very first, your fateful tete-а-tete;
Her gaze enchanting and her words,
Her laughter --lively, child-like?
What have you now? Where is it all?
Was it a lasting dream?
Alas, like northern summers,
It was a fleeting guest!
For her your love was naught but
Fate's awful judgment.
It weighed upon her life,
With undeserved shame.
A life of sacrifice, a life of trials!
Deep in her soul
She cherished memories . . .
Yet even they've betrayed her.
And earthly life has turned against her,
Its charms have disappeared. . .
The surging crowd's ground in the dirt
All that had flourished in her heart.
And what like ashes has she gathered
After her long torment?
Pain, the cruel pain of bitterness,
Pain without cease and without tears!
O, how our love is murderous,
The dearer something is to us
The surer are we to destroy it
In passion's savage blindness!"

One Man Gathers

Letters of Note: Ken Kesey
Heartbreaking letter from author Ken Kesey to his dear friends.
He says at the end: "One man gathers what another man spills."

How could you go ahead of me?
A letter from a woman to her husband.
She concludes with: "There is no limit to what I want to say and I stop here."

Something happens

Something happens as something always happens and it marks time into "there was before and there was after".  It was small.  It was big.  It changed your life.  It changed nothing but the way you told that story.  And the way you told the story was: there was before and there was after.