The morning after he left, I woke up and wasn’t sure what to do with my hands. Exhaling, I sat up in bed and pulled my laptop to my chest, opening a word document and writing the events of the previous night. Perhaps too close to the pain to utilize the first-person, I instead wrote in the second-person. ‘You collapse against the wall,’ the piece read, as though some narrator knew this was coming.
And so, in the months following, I continued the narrative. What if our heartbreaks had a narrator, I asked myself. What if somebody guided us through the healing, reassured our steps?
What followed will be posted here, a ten-part series, dubbed collectively ‘User’s Manual to a Broken Heart.’
Part I: Introduction to a Broken Heart
Part II: The Heart and the Mind
Part III: Stubborn-Ass Steps
Part IV: What Words Can / Cannot Do
Part V: The Miraculous Better
Part VI: On Wobbly Legs
Part VII: People Who Leave / People Who Stay
Part VIII: The Heart and the Mind, Revisited
Part IX: The Art of Letting Go
Part X: Return to the Breeze
michael king 