" The heart: such a precarious thing. Looking at it from a medical standpoint, the heart is a blood pumping organ that keeps you alive. Really, it’s an ugly little thing that only the strong stomached can view. Then you look at it figuratively. It’s a shape that teenage girls draw on their notebooks with their crushes name centered in the symbol, it’s one of the many renowned symbols of Valentine’s Day, and is most commonly known for breaking.
As a young girl, I never completely understood what they meant when they spoke of broken hearts. I wondered to myself how the magical, blood-pumping, organ could break. Wouldn’t you die if it broke? And the pictures, the infamous shape of a heart, led me to believe I had a Valentine’s card shaped drum, thumping away inside my chest. “No, no that can’t be right,” I thought when I’d ponder how my small body really worked.
I stayed home from daycare the days my mother had off and sat with her on our couch, watching soap operas. They were so much better than silly children’s TV shows; I already knew my ABC’s and 123’s. The characters on these shows would always be in love with someone or another, and there were always those who were “heartbroken”. I’d remind myself of the countless CSI episodes I watched with my dad and how real hearts look. The people who died, it was their hearts that were broken; they didn’t serve their purpose of keeping their body alive. Obviously, the soap opera actors were confused. They should watch CSI so they can know what a real broken heart is.
Then one episode changed my mind. The autopsy of the poor victim came back and they specifically said that there was nothing wrong with his heart. I pouted for days; my theories were all wrong. As any typical four year old, I started asking questions. “Mommy, what do they mean ‘a broken heart’?” The answer I received was fairly simple. “It’s when you’re really sad,” she’d reply. My brows would furrow in confusion. I thought about this for at least a week before I came to my next conclusion on what broken hearts really were.
The people on CSI died because they were sad! It seemed so obvious to me afterwards. That is what really happened with broken hearts. The soap opera characters were just being dramatic about it; after all, they were on a soap opera. The actors get paid for being overly dramatic. Oh how simple it seemed to me after this realization.
My sister and I, as all little children do, would pretend to be doctors. I even had a primary colored stethoscope. One day my sister was crying in our room. Feeling like the most qualified to fix my sister, I went to her with that silly piece of plastic hanging on my neck. Sitting in front of her, I pulled the ends of the stethoscope to my ears and placed the round base on her chest. “Ah, I see the problem,” I stated in my most mature sounding voice. “You are suffering from a breaking heart. If you don’t stop being sad, you will die and I’ll have to draw around you with chalk.” At the time, she was gullible enough to believe me and she stopped crying right away. Needless to say, I applauded myself on my perfect diagnosis.
As always, with age came more wisdom on this confusing theory of the heart. Though the question of its fatality was still something I pondered, I was sure by age eight that the heart was so much more than just a blood pumping organ and a shape of February cards. No, there is something called love, though that was lost on me completely.
Barbie and Ken were supposed to be in this thing called love. But my Barbie didn’t like Ken. I, unlike all the other girls fantasizing of magical princes and fairy tale weddings, believed I would never be married to a stupid Ken doll. Boys were dumb, they had cooties. I frowned at my—what seemed to be--determined fate of getting married. My Barbie doll didn’t even hang out with the Ken doll; they weren’t friends. So this thing called love? No, I decided it definitely was not for me.
However amazing my philosophies were, I still managed to get sucked into the ravings of other hormonal children when I reached my preteen ages. Though I was not too thrilled about this whole cycle of crushes and whatnot, it still managed to creep its way into my all too innocent heart. By fifth grade, my best friend had a boyfriend. We were eleven for Pete’s sake; I still believed boys were disgusting and had no interest in their pathetic lives. This hatred for the opposite gender fueled itself clear to junior high before it started to crumble in the face of stupid chemicals that run through every growing adolescent’s body.
I suppose it was inevitable; the sucking force of such a vacuum is hard to evade. There really is only one word that can sum up the thing everyone in junior high goes through: crushes. Such evil little things that slither into every youngsters’ mind. Needless to say, I personally didn’t give much stock into them. The whole cycle of these things called “crushes” made absolutely no sense to me.
The word crush, as any twelve year old would see it, was smashing something so it could never again be reconstructed. So why did they use this cruel word to describe the only love-life that a young adolescent has? Obviously, this meant that when you fall into like with someone, it smashes you so you can never be put back together again. This was the key! The childhood rhymes actually made sense to me now! My theories of love, they explain the poor, tragic tale of Humpty Dumpty. The poor little guy fell into this crush cycle, got his heart broken and became sad, sat on the wall and then BAM! That crush literally crushed him, and all the king’s horses and men couldn’t put him back together again. Then, I’m sure they made a CSI episode about it—how could they not?—and the soap opera characters were heartbroken at the kingdom’s loss of an egg. It all pulled together now.
The realization that the childhood rhyme actually had meaning, a meaning that was so horrific for the fateful egg, pushed me farther away from the ugly cycle of crush and be crushed. I would never, ever fall into a crush. Mother Goose passed down all of those stories for a reason: so that children would not have to end up broken like Humpty. After I connected those obvious puzzle pieces, I vowed to that wise bird I would never end up getting crushed by a stupid crush, get my heart broken, and then consequently die of sadness. No, I would live my life without these silly little problems of the heart.
Maybe I was young and naïve, but these theories were fool proof. I was positive that I had cracked the secret code of the heart; I broke through and saw it for what it really was. Since now I knew, I could avoid the wretched ache of a torn Valentine’s card. With these revelations, I could become a great doctor to diagnose the achy-breaky feeling of a crushed, broken heart and make my way into modern heroism. I knew I could avoid the painful sadness, and I believed I would help others to know the things I did so they could share my amazingly clear fate. Yes, I knew how to crack the spell, decipher the code. The world was now mine to behold for I had solved the unfathomable puzzle of the heart.
Oh the surprises that awaited me in my later years… "
~the em~
