She Left Him

…..time will cure your heartbreak.  Truth of the matter is, time is the ONLY thing that will cure it.  Nothing else works:  Not talking and joking around with good friends, not sympathetic family members, not immersing yourself one hundred percent in work, not hoping for and then receiving unexpected distractions, not traveling to exotic locales, not overeating at the dinner table like a starved pig, not even going on a good, old-fashioned one-week bender with a case of Jim Beam whiskey and a bongful of powerful Minnesota Green.  The passage of time is the only antidote for true heartbreak, and unfortunately there is nothing one can do to speed along or hopscotch over this lengthy process.  I admit that is difficult to hear this early in the game when the memory of her is still so unbearably fresh in your mind that you can see her and hear her and smell her and touch her and taste her all at the same time, but it is better that you hear the unvarnished version of the truth right now and not some bastardized version from a well-meaning but nescient dunce meant to temporarily uplift your spirits and raise false expectations.  The only thing that will not change with the passage of time will be your memory of this hideous moment, although that memory will become somewhat blurred around the edges down the road and hence morph into something marginally more palatable.  The excruciating heartbreak will leave you in time, but your memory of it will not.  As dreadful as you are feeling right now—And I can sense that your unhappiness is off the charts—the memory of this exact moment will still be distinctly awful one year from now, five years from now, twenty years from now…..even when you are lying on your deathbed and emotionally preparing to depart the mortal realm you will still be thinking back to that mortifying time in your youth when you were unfairly and unceremoniously jilted by an unappreciative lover. That knife cuts unbelievably deep and leaves behind an ugly, permanent scar.  Unrequited love is the cruelest, severest, most heartless entity known to mankind.  It is a numbingly ruthless, coldblooded, equal opportunity assassin.  This has always been the case since hominids first lifted their knuckles from the ground in eastern Africa and started walking on two extremities rather than four too many millennia ago to count, and this will forever be the case in the future too so long as two separate sexes exist and a full range of emotions, including end especially sensual, romantic love, remain an integral component of human consciousness.  The intense heartbreak you are feeling right now will go away in time—Trust me on that!—but there is no shortcut that can be taken which will shorten this process and no medicines which can be ingested that will lessen the pain and grotesque sadness you are feeling in this moment.  The first sentence of this brief essay bears repeating at this juncture, my disconsolate friend, because it really says everything that needs to be said in the fewest words possible:  The slow passage of time will cure your heartbreak, but nothing else can or will even come close to accomplishing this grievously longed-for objective……