A jammed-up heart can’t keep its beat, so how can time heal it? by Jude Potts

Her heart didn’t break.

It just jammed up with sick slicks of regret, sharp shards of pain, coils wound too tight without you to release them. Cogs turn uselessly without making contact. It ticks an erratic beat, sometimes so slow she barely feels, barely feels, then-its-too-fast,too-fast,nopauseforbreath-or-thought-just-plough-on-through-it-full-of-caffiene-anxiety-and-last-night’s-wine.

She doesn’t want to ‘put herself out there’. She doesn’t want to ‘meet someone nice’. She doesn’t want to just see whether she’d get on with her neighbour’s son, her workmate’s neighbour, her best friend’s boyfriend’s brother. 

She 

doesn’t want 

to bother, 

because her heart’s jammed up with you and your lazy smile and your soft voice and your eyes that pinned her to the floor and made it impossible to breathe unless it was to 

breathe

you

in.

She doesn’t want to join-a-site,set-an-age-range-and-the-number-of-miles-away-someone-should-live. She doesn’t want to scroll through men who visit Machu Pichu to stand and have their photo taken; who want to meet up, hook up, get hung up on her pale blue eyes that never meet theirs because 

they 

are 

not 

yours and they cannot hold her heavy gaze. 

Her heart’s a barely ticking thing because you were the space between beats, the hope, the dreams, the heat that kept her heart beating in time. 

And hasn’t she tried to unjam it? 

She’s walked endless beaches, joined night classes, learned Italian, thrown pots, joined a joyless choir, bought a damned dog.

Hasn’t she tried to slam-it-back-to-life-with-nights-out-and-too-much-drinking-and-casualfucking?

But-men-who-weren’t-you-have-mouths-that-taste-wrong,-move-to-rhythms-that-feel-wrong,-stroke-too-soft,grind-too-hard;

are

not

you.

Fleeting pleasures let her lose herself in friction but twist her heart into complicated coils of betrayal, guilt and regret.

They tell her time heals all wounds and she wonders how much time. One year? Two? Ten?  

Her heart’s rapid-rattle rips through her like bullets and she knows there is no healing. It can’t keep time, her not-broken heart that just keeps on beating long after she wishes

it 

would 

just 

stop. 

So she curls around the dog in a well-worn spot and they howl until her voice is hoarse and she tastes the sharp tang of blood. Her swollen eyes close, she breathes gently in time with the snoring dog. Inside something slowly uncoils and her heart holds time for a few beats.

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