How to Heal a Broken Heart

HOW TO HEAL A BROKEN HEART

Copyright 2012, Kelsey Barnholdt, all rights reserved. This book is a work
of fiction, and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.

How do you get over someone? How do you heal a broken heart? It’s a question asked all over the world every single day. Every day different people deal with something they thought deep down would never happen.

A relationship ending or a friendship going sour -- people surprise us, and well, let’s be honest, sometimes they completely shatter us. For some people there were signs

-- little things they knew deep down meant something. For others, it comes completely out of nowhere. Either way somehow, someway, we’re left to pick up the pieces. To have to face the fact that somehow we have to be okay again, even if it’s without a person we thought we would always have. But how do we do this? How do we become okay again?

And for that matter what does “okay” even mean?

To answer this, to truly answer how one gets over another person, I have to back to the beginning.

The first time I lay eyes on Rich Carn I’m wearing a Sponge Bob t-shirt. No, I’m not kidding. Not just any Sponge Bob t-shirt either, but a bright yellow one with Sponge Bob’s face blown up obnoxiously across the front of it. I’ve been at the beach all day with my family and had grabbed it from my mom’s beach bag to throw on last minute over my bathing suit. It was way too big for me and came down past my knees.

I was on my way to our van dragging behind me our huge cooler, three towels, and a beach bag stuffed with everything you could ever need for a fun filled day at the beach. It was taking both hands and all of my strength just to move the pile of stuff halfway across the parking lot. I was just about to abandon the beach bag on the sidewalk and come back for it when I spotted him.

The first thing you notice about a boy like Rich Carn is that he’s dangerous. His eyes are so dark I’m afraid that up close they could be black. His hair was just as dark and despite the nice weather he was dressed head to toe in black. He was leaning up against the fence surrounding the beach smoking a cigarette. He was the kind of guy your mother warned you about and it made him all the more appealing. I had never seen anyone who seemed as interesting as he did in that moment and the fact that his eyes were fixated directly on me didn’t help.

I tried o not stare back but it wasn’t something I could help. When he tossed his cigarette over the fence and into the sand then starting walking toward me I could feel my heart beating so fast in my chest I thought it might explode. My experience with boys was limited to say the least. And when I say limited I mean none talked to me. At all.

He stopped directly in front of me and looked me up and down, as if trying to figure out if I was worth the effort. I must have passed whatever test was going on in his mind because he slowly nodded to himself. “Cute shirt.”

They were the first words out of his mouth and I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. There was no smile on his face and I could feel my face start to turn red. He liked this because a satisfactory look passed over his face then. “Where is this going?” he asked me scooping the cooler up off the ground as if it were light as a feather.

I somehow found my voice. “Uh, blue van, over there.” I found myself pointing.

He accepts this and starts walking toward the van. I stand there watching him go, I’m to shocked to move.

“You coming?” he calls over his shoulder without turning to look at me and I hurry to catch up to him.

“So does the girl in the sponge bob t-shirt have a name?” he asks me as we approach our van.

I start to dig through the bag on my shoulder as we walk, looking for the car keys I’d seen my mom throw somewhere in there earlier this afternoon. My hand touches a bottle of sunscreen and I make my eyes focus on the contents of the bag, I make my eyes focus on anything and everything except for him. I don’t know how someone I just met can make me so nervous, but he does.

“S-Stephanie,” I tell him never taking my eyes off of the beach bag.

He chuckles. “I’m Rich. Of course I can tell you that without stuttering.”

The comment makes me feel young and immature and when we reach our car all I want to do is crawl in the trunk and disappear from his field of vision.

He drops the cooler on the ground and reaches into the pocket of his shorts and pulls out a cell phone and holds it out to me. I just look at him and he rolls his eyes, then reaches down, grabs my hand and shoves the phone into it. “Put your number in,” he orders.

I do. I don’t think twice about it. And when I hand the phone back he shoves it back into his pocket and then starts to walk back across the parking lot without another word.

“Will you call me?” I call out. It sounds desperate even to me and I wish I could take it back the second the words leave my mouth.

He stops and turns around to look at me. “Maybe, I mean that’s as long as your boyfriend doesn’t care.” He laughs out loud after he says it like the thought of me having a boyfriend couldn’t possibly be true. Then he turns around again and is gone just as fast as he came.

I thought about him the whole drive home. I had spent my entire sixteen years on earth wanting to be noticed. Hoping that somehow, someway, a boy would notice me. I hated movies that didn’t have a happy ending and I wouldn’t read books I knew didn’t end with the girl getting the guy. I believed in happy endings, no, I
counted
on happy endings.

I had thought about nothing but how there’s that one person out there for everyone for the last six years. I couldn’t wait for my happy ending, I couldn’t wait to be loved.

Of course when you’re young you don’t realize that sometimes you have to go through the bad to get to the good. You don’t realize that the first guy may not be the best guy. He may not be the one who’s supposed to make you happy forever. You don’t realize that there’s a bigger picture.

Instead, you dive headfirst as fast as you can into something that turns out to be a disaster for your heart.

I didn’t hear from Rich for three days and I had almost convinced myself I had imagined the whole thing when the text message came.

“Lets hang out.” That was it, no hi, no how are you, and no introduction. Yet somehow I knew it was him and somehow it was enough, somehow it was enough to make me feel like he wanted me.

We met at a diner. I was amazed by him, but I wasn’t stupid enough to just drive off somewhere with him. I figured a public place was the best route to go. He didn’t exactly seem like the type to take me off into the woods and hack me to pieces but somewhere in the back of my mind was my dad’s voice telling me over and over again how you can never be to carful these days.

The date is fast, I babble a lot, and I’m so nervous I can feel myself sweating way too much more than a few times through out the night. But he kisses me at the end of the night and for the first time in as long as I can remember I feel special, I feel like I have someone who is mine.

I fall hard and I fall fast. My life started to revolve around Rich. I lived for spending time with him and I would ditch anyone and anything to see him. Rich called and wanted to see me and I had plans with my friends? My friends were ditched. My mom wanted to have a family dinner and Rich suddenly got the night off? I would blow off dinner. He came before anyone and anything else, even myself. As a result my relationships with the people in my life started to fade. Eventually my friends stopped calling, my little sister stopped asking me to do things with her and my parents stopped caring if I came to dinner every night.

My weekends were spent waiting for him. If he went out with his friends for the night and I didn’t hear from him I would hold my phone in my hand hoping he would text or call me soon. My grades were slipping and I was lying to everyone about everything.

All the money I had saved over the years from babysitting, birthdays, Christmas, and other holidays was slowly dwindling away. This was because if I saw anything that I thought Rich would like or want I didn’t hesitate to buy it. It became so bad that I couldn’t even remember the last time I had spent any money on myself.

I didn’t care though. I didn’t care if I didn’t have any friends. Or if I wasn’t doing well in school, or if I was barely talking to my family anymore. I was in love and as long as I had Rich I had everything. I didn’t need anyone or anything else.

Naturally, when he ended it I was devastated. He was my first love, my first kiss, my first everything. I had honestly believed that we would be together forever. He didn’t really have a reason for breaking up with me; “I just don’t really like feel it anymore you know?” No, I didn’t know.

I felt like I was going to die. I had never understood the expression heartbreak but I could literally feel my heart aching in my chest. I thought there was no way I could feel worse, but that’s how the world works. One horrible thing is usually followed by more horrible things.

The relationship was clearly unhealthy. I cared on a completely different level than he did. While it was true that we had some good memories, it seemed like in my mind I was making it out to be much better than it was. Of course you don’t think about that at the time, all you can think about is the pain. It’s almost impossible to recognize a unhealthy situation while you’re involved in it because you’re not healthy yourself. It takes a healthy person to realize they deserve to be treated like they matter.

Of course when you’re sixteen and you’ve just had your heart shattered for the first time no one tells you that, and even if they did you probably wouldn’t listen. You don’t want to hear any of that, you don’t want to think about any of that, because all you can think about is the pain. The pain in your heart that seems to be traveling through your whole body.

Most people go through different stages once a relationship is over. You call or text them a number of times hoping they will answer or hoping they will somehow say it was a mistake and they miss you like crazy. Then you move on to making yourself crazy, checking his facebook like twenty times a day, staring at your phone wishing he would call, even driving past his house (oh come on, we’ve all done it), then you move on to crying. The crying is different for everyone, for some it’s constant, for others it’s so rare that it feels like it never happened at all.

No matter how many tears you cry, no matter if you share your heartbreak with the world or with no one, no matter if you walk around like your world is destroyed or with a smile that reveals nothing that you feel inside we all reach a point. A point comes where something happens letting us know can’t keep beating ourselves up all day long. It can come a few days after, or a few weeks, or honestly a few months after. A point where the world says he isn’t coming back and that we have no choice but to let it go, no choice but to somehow carry on again. And that point is when the real healing begins, that point is when you have to try like hell to be okay again. That’s the point that is the scariest because you feel like you’ve let yourself slip to the point of no return, yet the universe is forcing you to get up off the ground.

Two weeks after Rich broke up with me I’m laying in my bed with the covers pulled over my head. I feel like I’m going to cry but somehow I can’t. I think its because I’ve cried so much that there’s nothing left inside of me. My parents have no idea how upset I really am. They clearly know I’ve been moping around the house, but they don’t know I cry myself to sleep every night or feel so horrible inside that I don’t feel like things are going to get better.

I’m just laying there staring at the insides of my blanket when my little sister walks in. Actually from the sounds of it she runs in but I figure if I pretend to be asleep she might leave so I lay perfectly still. I’m just about to try to figure out how to fake snore when she throws the blanket off my body and plops her little body on my bed.

“Hello.” She says. She’s wearing a pink tutu with bright purple tights and what looks like a yellow crown. Her hair is twisted on the top of her head in a braid and she’s wearing bright pink lipstick. “I’ve come to invite you to my tea party.”

I sigh and open my eyes to talk but she cuts me off.

“Now it’s true that you keep declining my offers but I thought I would give you one last chance to accept before I gave you your dismissal paperwork.” She’s waving around a yellow envelope, which I can only assume are my “dismissal” papers.

“Megan, do you even know what dismissal” means?” I ask.

She rolls her eyes “Don’t talk to me like I’m a child Stephanie, of course I know what it means, I’m almost eight. It means you’re kicked out!”

“Kicked out?”

“Yup. Kicked out of the group. I mean, you haven’t been to tea in weeks and honestly if I were you I’d be kind of embarrassed. You’re the topic of conversation all the time.”