Why Shattered Hearts Still Beat

I think we all have a little bit of wanting to save the world in us, therein, we all innately want to see ourselves in making a difference to people. But I’ve learnt, that it is ok if we only make a difference to one person, and what’s more, it is ok if that person is ourselves. It’s ok to be our own heroes. 

An Essay on Hope and Love, despite it all.

Why Shattered Hearts Still Beat - Written by Lucy Matthews; 4th September 2023

Why shattered hearts still beat is a fascinating conjecture.
Why continue to hope? Why continue to love?

-

People have never really understood me. At times it seems
they believe I'm from another planet, but no, I'm from Earth,
just like you. I hurt, just like you. But despite the
commonality of immense feeling, many have glanced at me, as I
look up on those dark nights, and thought that I was a
tragedy. They thought I was delusional, beyond help, without
hope. They say this because I leave the backdoor unlocked for
people who can never come home. I call people who can never
pick up and I look for people in places they can never be,
because they're gone, these people. They're simply, not,
there. Such is life they were gone too soon, gone too
callously, but gone, nevertheless. I can not deny that within
me there is a spark of eclectic madness which seems to
present to many as some cataclysmic display of despair, but
to those who see the pain I ask you, can you see the beauty?

There is no doubt that my life is full of tragedy and at
times, I indeed find great comfort in my reverie, but my
goodness, I have never, been without hope. There are of
course moments where I feel I have swum too far from the
safety of the shore, as the crashing waves of darkness
overwhelm me, but these are the moments where I notice the
stars, for they're brighter than ever.

The reason why I leave the backdoor unlocked, why I make
those calls and why I will never stop searching for the
people I have lost, is not some misplaced sense of wishful
phantasmagoria, it's because I believe. I believe that if
your heart is in the right place, and the stars are too, then
people that are lost, can, come home. Those that are silenced
can answer your calls and those that you love, can be in the
places that you long for them to be. Even if just, for a
moment. I think those moments, those remarkable ripples in
time, are exactly what life is all about. They, are why you
hope.

-

And why you love? Well, I've found love to be a truly
fascinating notion; a melodious contradiction as it were. You
see, love may be completely at home in the realm of mystical
fantasy, but it is by no means a fairytale. The reciprocity
of love is a fleeting luxury, for there will always come a
time where affection becomes merely a souvenir, and yet, one
can not deny that love is immortal. Love can make you feel
inimitable, like you have the power to raise empires of

undiluted aspiration and oceans of emerald dreams. It can
make you feel like you are time and space itself, but it can
also make you feel insignificant, unworthy, destroyed.

I am certain that love is magical, for in a galaxy of
possibilities, you can wish upon the same stars and hope
under the same moon, but I need not warn you, it is not
without violence. Love is not without fear.

The fear of loving seems to go hand in hand with the fear of
loss. It is inevitable that you will love and, by gum, you
will lose, but that does not mean you will not win.

It is remarkable actually, how overrated fear truly is. Fear
is like a magician. It makes monsters of the art of
misdirection and is awfully good at making us feel
inadequate. One can fear that they are not enough, or in fact
fear that they are too much, but I reckon that might just be,
the fear of being yourself, and there is no need to be
apprehensive of the person that you are. There is no shame in
being hurt, for wounds are not disasters in ones soul, but
opportunities to heal. You need not fear being liberal with
love, for the love you give will never be a waste, and it is
ok to be a sentence in someones life, as they fill libraries
in yours. That does not mean you are unimportant, simply your
fluency in them was not reciprocated.

In life, you lose people; sometimes it's your fault,
sometimes it's not and sometimes, nobody is at fault at all.
Sometimes, losing someone is the best thing that ever happens
to you, but it always hurts. Like poetry, it hurts. But
that's good. For a star to be born, a nebula must first
collapse. So collapse, be destroyed, that is not where your
story ends. A quintessential being, must have chapters. There
must be pages of your life that drown in tears and pages that
bask in the ethereal sunlight, and every time, you must turn
the page. With blurred vision and broken anatomy, you must
keep, turning, the page. Because I've found if you keep the
story going, then one day, be that sixteen days or sixteen
years later, you will find that you have made your morning
coffee, you have gone to work, you have laughed with friends,
you have been kind to strangers, and under the beauty of the
sun slowly setting, you will pick up the phone to call them,
realising that today, you hadn't yet thought of them.

Sure the backdoor is still unlocked and you were subtly
hopeful that they would be around every corner, and yes you
find yourself trying to call them once more but perhaps,
perhaps a part of you is now content in the fact that they
will not pick up. Perhaps a part of you has made peace with
the fact that they are a memory for you to visit. A memory to

skip rocks and dance under the moonlight with. A memory to
see in the brushstrokes of certain paintings, to view in
certain cloud formations and to hear in certain lyrics. A
memory that matters to you, but does not define you.

Like I said, love is not a fairytale, and that's because,
love is real. But although fairytales do not grapple with a
reality beyond the world of fabrication, they do teach us one
beautiful lesson; monsters have always existed, but so has
the magic. And the magic, that, is why you love.

Ultimately I think shattered hearts still beat, to remind us.

I believe we all have a little bit of wanting to save the
world in us, and I don't think that's due to an inflated
sense of self-importance or a sweeping flare of vaulting
ambition, more the fact, that we are human beings.

The way I see it, life is a sequence of circumstantial
events, and these events, be that of natural or nurturing
derivation, are composed of an exchange of people,
information, ideas and feelings. Of course in this exchange
we gain things, but we also lose, and when we lose, parts of
ourselves tend to go with it. I reckon these exchanges create
gaps in our life, gaps where things are taken from us, and
gaps where parts of ourselves are displaced. We're all
fundamentally aware of these deficiencies, but we like to
place a perception filter around them and allow our
subconscious to keep them at bay. I think that that
translates into an innate tendency to want to fill those gaps
in other people.

The simple reminder that we are not unique in our struggles,
has never made our pain go away, but the ubiquitous beauty of
scattered adoration reminds us that we have gaps to fill. It
reminds us that we're human.

So, to those of us who have lost someone, to those of us who
have lost ourselves, and to those of us who wonder why their
shattered heart still beats.

It's simply because, we aren't done yet.

We've still got work to do, gaps to fill. We've still got
tears to cry, pain to feel, stars to adore, art to admire,
space to explore, poetry to write, eyes to get lost in, dogs
to pet and biscuits to perfectly evaluate the dunkability of.
We've got memories to forge, moons to dance under, Rubix
cubes to solve, mistakes to make, lessons to learn, TV to

watch, chess games to win, plants to overwater, cups of
coffee to drink and above all else, we've still got people to
love. We've still got a life to lead.

And yes our hearts will never be the same, but in time, I
promise you, you will believe again. On those dark nights,
whilst you swim in the oceans of misapprehension, you will
look up, you will notice the stars are closer than ever and
then, you will believe again. You will believe that magic has
always existed, even if just, for a moment. And then it'll
hit you, that that moment, that remarkable ripple in time, is
exactly what life is all about.

The beauty of despair; it's why shattered hearts still beat.
It's why we hope. It's why we love.

LM