the pulse of your broken open heart (for when your heart hurts)

you are worthy of feeling every little nuance

Digest / 2023 / Ashley Blanton

You felt like being touched with loving hands for the first time in my life. You pulled me in, hips, belly, chest and that long, deep kiss in Penn Station. Too long and too deep to happen in public. Time stopping. Hours expanding into centuries, talking about everything and nothing. Phone calls leading to soft, wet ecstasy. Fantasies sauntering around Brooklyn, dancing in parks, nestling into unspeakable intimacy.

The truth is, you fuck me once, eat my pussy as if you will die without her — as if you are a newborn child hungry for milk and oxygen — and then you drop me. Before you drop me but after you fuck me, you take me for a Michelin star dinner, then sleep with your arm wrapped around my soft, open body. You wake before me the next morning, serve me coffee, then push a dagger into my heart from the front, so slow I feel every atom of the blade becoming part of me.

Blood pours from my chest and my hands and my feet for ten hours as we walk from your underground apartment to the edges of Brooklyn. I do not hold it together. I cry and write of my heartbreak at the next table over on the patio of an overpriced coffee shop while you video conference to people in Germany with a shaky internet connection.

I would like to leave right away but I stay for a few days and let you pay for everything because you broke my already delicate heart (perhaps you would not have been able to break her, otherwise) and the trains home are three times the price on Saturday than they are on Monday. You offer to pay for my ticket, but I already know you will not do that. You do not really want to release me.

I try to be strong and I try to be okay but you fucked my already shattered heart to pieces. It is weird that you know my ex boyfriend — that you looked me up on the internet and found the gofund me I set up for him when his life washed away and the fantasy I had been creating washed away, too. It was always more fragile than I wanted to let myself in on.

You still want to be friends, as I am weeping again in your kitchen, as you light a beeswax candle and cook for me. What you really want is to feel a woman’s heart splayed out on your butcher block. You want to feel the way you felt when I came for the sound of your voice from 300 miles away. You want to feel the poetry I poured in the aftermath — the closeness and the distance of those intimate hours, not touching, only listening. You want all of the words to still be true. You do not want to have turned into a terrified child after fucking me.

My bleeding heart is not exactly about you. It is about my heart reopening after two years and a trillion little papercuts and feeling the actual death of the fantasy. My heart has been held together by a single gossamer thread, and your dagger split it.

My heart unravels. Each of the trillion and one cuts gasping open as if to breathe — all of them, all at once —flooding with my own crimson blood, revealing a paper chain of heart strings connecting me to every one and every thing that has ever touched me.

I am not over it.
I never will be.
I do not want to be over
unraveling.

You opened space in me.

I am expanding through layers of heartache.

Sometimes the ache spreads my heart so wide it takes months to travel from one thread of fascial web to the next. Sometimes following the thread feels emptier than empty. The black velvet quiet at the center of my spinal column. The pulse in the back of my heart that rises from the earth and descends from the heavens and unfolds every heartshaped bruise and blemish of my body and envelopes each one in the ancient salve of friendliness and cherishes every quaking part of me.

Heart Flowering Open - Guided Visualization

Tuck in somewhere you will be undisturbed for ten minutes and drop into your heart. You can be seated on a chair or on a cushion/on the floor — choose a seat that allows your spine to lengthen.

Journaling Prompt

Free write for five to ten minutes, beginning with the sensations you noticed in your heart as you breathed and sensed into this inner space. Were there any textures, colors, emotions, images that surfaced for you? Did you feel numbness? Are there any messages your heart would like to offer you? Don’t think about it, just let your heart speak through your words - or if no words come, you can try drawing what you sensed.

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