I've not left my bed today, because there doesn't seem a lot of point. It's raining intermittently, I'm crying intermittently, and - although if I could coordinate the two to stop or start at the same time they might cancel each other out - I'm not in the mood for timing.
The worst thing about hurting is knowing that the other party is not. If you get hit by a truck, you want to at least know that you've dented the fender; if you fall out of a window, it's nice to know that you've left an impression in the grass, however faint it might be. If somebody takes your heart out of the fridge, breaks it and then eats it in pieces, it would be reassuring to know that they haven't gone surfing for the weekend to celebrate. When they do - when the truck drives away unscathed, and the grass pings back, and the boy takes his board and a group of friends to the sea - it feels as if you were never there to start with. As if you have dissolved, somehow, into thin air: the way a fly might feel after it has flown into your eye, obliterated itself in your pupil and then been blinked away without even a slowed step.
Too much of anything can be unhealthy, and it is certainly true of the 'character' I am - according to my friends this morning - building. I don't want to build character anymore. I have enough of it already, and too much of it makes you hard and impermeable and brittle: ready to snap at the next disappointment. I don't need to learn to be happy alone: I am already a solitary creature, and struggle to be with others in peace. And - before they say it, even though I know they mean well - I don't want to be made stronger either. I am more than strong enough. It's being vulnerable that's hard for me. It's the weakness I needed to practice.
Somewhere, in all of this - in giving everything you have for love and losing it all, spectacularly - is a lesson to be learnt. There is always a lesson to be learnt, just as there is always a seed in every fruit (and sometimes many: for instance, in a strawberry). But I have to be honest: from my bedroom - a safe zone that ironically was rocked last night as physically as it was emotionally, thanks to a large and rather scary earthquake that woke me up at 4am - I can't see it right now. I'm not sure what there is to be learnt. Whether I should be learning that you should never give anything up for love; that you should protect yourself at all times, in case it hurts at the end. Whether I should be learning to be suspicious, distrusting, hard, strong. Whether I should learn to hide my feelings, or control them, or kill them before they kill me. And never again repeat the mistakes I made this time.
But if I do that, then the heartbreak wins. If I do that, then the love - the next love, wherever it may come from - will lose. Because I will have so much character, so much strength, so much knowledge, that it will not be able to reach me. The delicate things that love grows from - trust, hope, vulnerability, self-sacrifice, weakness, innocence - will have been tucked away so far inside me that nothing reaches them anymore, and I will forget that they are even there.
I will not learn from my mistakes this time. I have learnt enough. I will not be stronger, I will not be wiser. I will not hold my head up and pretend that I'm not hurting.
Because if I do, then I might never be hurt again. And that, I think, would be the saddest thing of all.
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