Broken Heart

By Doug Forbes

I don’t sleep much. Maybe 3-4 hours each night.

It’s because my heart and my head are all over the place. Skipping, spinning, sinking, seemingly broken.

To straighten things out, I run in the morning. I lock my headphones down over my ears, fix my sunglasses and hat tight. I lock the world out and my heart and mind in.

Roxie, age 4

No matter how inward I go, something occasionally pulls me out. On my run home the other morning, I happened to look toward my feet at a craggy section of the street. And there it was, what looked like three arteries feeding a heart.

I stopped. And I stared. Then I changed my iPod from music to camera and took a shot. Tears spilled. And my breath left me in heaving fits. No matter how far I run or deep I try to hide, I cannot escape the fact that my daughter is gone. Forever. And everything will remind me of that. Even cracks and holes in concrete.

Broken Heart Syndrome is a thing. It can be brought about by a flush of stress hormones. The result mimics a heart attack. What I’m feeling is a bit different. Sometimes it’s as if my heart is being teased by the ebb and flow of a tide of acid. Other times it’s as if I swallowed a jug of chlorine. My lungs clog. My heart chugs through the poison.

I know. It’s sounds crazy. But they’re the only explanations I have.

Roxie’s smile, her eyes, her glow, her very being — they fueled my heart. But all of it — and her heart — are ashes. Now I have to figure out how my heart won’t turn to ashes too.