Is it humanly possible to die of a broken heart?
I think it is.
Because how else would you explain my shallow breathing, unrelenting tears, shuddering body, and skin stinging as if pierced by a thousand needles?
If the ground were to split apart below my feet and swallow me whole, I’d let it without a second thought. What would be the point of living with no heart and half a soul?
And as if my battered self could take any more devastation, he mutters without an ounce of regret on his face, “You didn’t really think I’d choose you, did you?”
More than his words, it’s his stare as he roves his eyes over the length of my body—slow, dismissive—that makes my knees nearly buckle with shame and embarrassment. The ugly reminder of my body rearing its ugly head.
Of all the people in the world…
Noah wasneversupposed to be one of them.
Never the one to break me and my trust like this.
The last flicker of any hope I had vanishes when my tired eyes scan for something—anythingto show this is hurting himas much as it’s hurting me—on his face.
There’s nothing.
My feet carry me out of his penthouse with whatever’s left of me, and when he doesn’t stop me once, that’s when the fire he lit inside of me extinguishes, leaving smoldering embers in its wake.
I let myself out of the home and life of the man who kissed me like we had forever, when we didn’t even last a summer.
As I walk under the cloudy night sky, the world losing its color that seemed so bright once, the replay of the time we spent together and the way we parted playing on a loop in my mind, I realize that I will never recover.
Not from this.
And that I had been right all along.
Noah Miller was always going to be my undoing.
Forty Two
Andie
It’s been almost a week since I last saw him.
A week since I had my heart brutally crushed beneath his unyielding, relentless pursuit of hurting me, and what was left of the confidence I had put together piece by piece.
I have spent the entire week being a hermit, not leaving the house for anything—God bless the delivery apps—and curling up with Millie whenever she lets me.
No matter what I do, however many glasses of wine I drown myself in, the persistent acheseems to keep growing in my chest. The heartbreak is a physical pain at this point, a constant pressure in my chest that I don’t know how to escape.
I haven’t talked to anybody in days—not my family, my friends, or my colleagues. I’m officially on “sick leave” and currently not taking visitors. Not in the condition I am in—red eyes, raw throat, and reeking of bad decisions and rejection.
What hurts even more is that no one would know what we had because, for the world, our relationship, the time we spent together healing and loving each other, never existed. And that truth presses like a log against my throat.
We were never real.
I’ve been through breakups, but none of them broke me enough to snatch that little flicker of hope from me. But breaking up with Noah when we weren’t really in a relationship—not for the world anyway—weighs on me, makes me want to cut my skin open and remove any trace of him ever being there, while at the same time I want to preserve what little we had.
Being away from Noah is like something vital has been scooped out of me, making my worldfeel quieter, duller. The colors of the rainbow don’t hit the way they used to as I see it spreading across the sky from my bedroom window. The sight of it only makes me sob harder, every breath a struggle to hold on to the land of the living as the memories of every time he called me ‘Rainbow’ barrel through me with the intensity of a thousand suns.
There’s a reminder of him in every corner of my home. The couch reminding of the night I told him about my wish list, the kitchen reminding me of every time he fed me with so much sincerity. And his t-shirt that I’m wearing reminds me of his safe leather scent, tickling my nostrils.
When I pull at the cloth to sniff it, the fact that his smell has almost vanished causes me to break out in another gut-wrenching sob, my stomach pulling tighter with the physical pain of it—vanishing exactly like we did, fading away slowly until there was nothing left save for the emptiness in my soul.