I'm better at having a broken heart than you are

The thing is, I'm just better at having a broken heart. I've been tossing it at boys since I was 8 years old. I know this letdown. I know the path. I don't like it, and the hill is a bitch. But I know it. Its grooves are familiar, and as much as I hate finding myself here, I know the way home.

But I bet you don't. And here's where my strategy of open-heartedness will pay off, while your choice to wall away in your castle denying you feel will fail. I love and scream and swear with a full throat and an outstretched hand and a constant willingness to see my faults. Your exacting nature does not permit such searching; you will never waver from your course, will never back down, will never reconsider. You are too careful to be broken, and you will quietly gather any disobedient hurt bits and hide them away. No one will know. And you will be even more precise in the future. Even more rigid. Impervious.

Messiness doesn't mind mistakes quite as much. A guileless love is unashamed of heartbreak; a childlike and effusive love knows and accepts the cost of emotional sincerity - or simply forgets it. I throw my heart away joyfully, with glee, with abandon, just to watch how beautifully it tumbles down the hill.

And thus I know heartbreak. I know it well. 

And you do not.

All my exaggerated pantomimes and microscopic linguistic analysis of my own emotions don't seem to be encouraging you to express yours. And I cannot feel them for you, although I sense that part of what drew you to me was the hope that you could delegate this task. But if you cannot feel and express and make sense of the boundaries between your emotions and your responsibilities, if you cannot see how this is not "extra work" but is the foundation of being intimate with another person, you cannot have any patience or understanding for someone who lives each day on the floor of the sorting house, slowly sifting and classifying and making piles to organize the chaos, trying her best to build meaningful intimacy with the people in her life.

I saw you tonight, ranger on the move, passionately arranging some deal on the phone you told me was broken. Good luck to you. But I think you have more feelings than you care to admit. And I don't envy you that realization.

I am better than you at falling apart, and that means I have more experience picking myself up.