Collecting emotions

While nursing a broken heart, I ironically feel more... complete.

This is one emotion I have never experienced before. Rather it's more like several emotions - I taste anger, pity, regret, hurt, grievance... then melancholy - all rolled into one. You can't quite place a finger around it but yet it's more palpable than anything you have felt before. 

Maybe the fact that it's so elusive yet so unmistakably there, makes it so heart-wrenching. Like a wisp dancing in the shadows. It never truly goes away - something, somewhere, somehow - lingering. Then it gets triggered - by a flighty animal, a simple lyric, a mirthful chuckle, a remnant memory. And in the most unexpected way, you feel that familiar deep twist to the heart. Yes, as much figurative as it is literal.

Things weren't turned out to be actually [edit] dramatic. But they still hurt anyway. So very much.

Perhaps this is what they mean by living a life - a collection of experience and emotions. How many have you collected?

--Lewis Carroll
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

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