Storytime: Heartbreak

It felt strange. I was warm and cold, full and empty, but more than anything else I was angry and confused. Everyone had crowded inside; it had started to snow again.

It was snowing. Piles of it had been scooted to the side of  the walk ways and everyone was bustling to get inside. The beat of my heart and rush of blood behind my ears just kept getting louder and louder the longer I held up my dam of emotions with toothpicks of sheer will. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't think, I just had to get out of there.

I found myself in a gazebo near the forest surrounding the school; nobody was trying to stay out in the cold so I was alone. Snow flurries blurred my vision, mixing with the tears I was finally letting fall. I couldn't stand any more, instead I was kneeling, praying as the comforting chill moved in and around me. The sound of my heart was ironically being drowned out by a Paramore song of the same name. My dam burst.

It wasn't so much the person breaking my heart that left me feeling so much and so fast, because truthfully, Captain is nobody worth crying for (at least not yet). It was the rush of realizing how little I truly valued myself if a person could make me into someone other than I am in such a short amount of time. It was the crushing power of my own strength caving in on me. It was my shame, my disappointment, my anger and my feeling of hopelessness that had me prostrate before God in the snow on a Tuesday morning.

To this day, I can't listen to that Paramore song without becoming teary. It reminds me to never go back to that place that took me so long to get from, that place of no longer knowing who I was. It reminds me to not just come to God in times of turmoil, but to come all the time and with a grateful spirit. As I see it, that heartbreak, even under the guise of a know-nothing boy, shaped who I am now. It lead me to better understand myself and further solidified a lesson that had taken so long to finally cement in: Tears are not weakness.