They lie on a surface where tears play the role of a sponge and can see flashbacks. They are consistent like waves but have unexpected sizes. You want to ask a question starting with 'why' and ending with losing the rest of your language skills. What remains is a cross-section of pain.
You lie there staring at the chat screen until the closest person appears as "online". Now this is the highest intimacy you can have.
You lie there until you fall into a shallow sleep for a few seconds. You discover the shadow of new pain and pay for it immensely.
You lie in a rolling paralysis silence to replace acute pain. Friends offer advice and console, but as if separated from them by the soundproof glass window of a recording studio, you cannot hear them.
You lie there, playing a song that goes beyond limits, thinking, and immediately playing to feel pain through paralysis. Pain becomes the only living indicator.
You begin to slip into the furniture of your life - rejecting new encounters, putting laughter in the archive, putting fierceness on pause. As you gaze into the mirror of memory, you question all co-occurrences, that is, imagination, new voices, new meanings, new significance. Symptoms appear where joy once was. This is all you can do at this stage. You have not yet earned the right to enter the vast valley of sorrow.
This right is on the opposite side of open-heart surgery. You must perform yourself calmly and put the lenses of your relationships into the sea of reflection. Words you have started to overuse, clothing items representing relationship passage consciousness, apps you thought you hadn't thought about on your phone, shared adventures, new recipes, old posters, secret emoticons, subscription logs-ins, entire cities. These broken pieces become sharper and hurt with every movement. However, like broken glass in the sea, they become soft and turn into amusing tokens of the past, harmless treasures with a distant origin.
This is when you lightly tap your back for starting a new paragraph, going back in, letting go of things, and performing the miracle of doing it all over again.
Then one day, you realize for the first time that the sunset sky has the ability to breathe, and freshly brewed tea is much better than the slightly sweet liquid you have been drinking recently. It may take dozens of hours in therapy, acquiring unexpected pets, or realizing just one earwig.
Your heart is now healing every time it feels numb, and you are ready to prepare for the free fall once again.