The Missing Piece

What is it about a broken heart that demands you go back and revisit the moment or moments of the breaking? Is it because you secretly think you will find the missing piece? Failing that, is it the hope that at least, you will find how to glue the shattered pieces back in place, one-by-one?

Or perhaps it is even more fundamental. Do you argue in your head whether your heart is actually broken? The litany repeats itself over and over. I am alive. I walk, talk, breathe. I even feel the most delicate touch, like fresh snow on my cheeks. Out of the corner of my eye, I see it glisten on the ends of my golden hair. Or maybe, it’s more stark, as the cold winter wind cuts across your face, you feel the sting so sharply that you burrow deep into your coat collar. You repeat, yes, I am alive, my lips are dull and chapped and my hands are numb. I am alive! At night, under the electric blanket, you feel a false warmth born of electricity of a different kind. You are warm, but not warmed.

You keep looking. Then it happens. Some mundane everyday event triggers the psyche and you sense you are close to finding the answer, the missing piece. It happened while I was driving to work in the darkness of an early January morning in Wisconsin. I was peering through frosted windows at white lines when it occurred to me, that I was simply making a rote drive in a rote manner. I was frozen in a moment of my own making.

I watched the ice on the windshield shatter as it met the wiperblade, swish, crush, swish, crush. After time, what didn’t get caught by the blade slowly began to melt. The heat from within and warmed the glass. I watched the ice crystals as they became drops, then small rivulets and then they simply disappeared. It was suddenly so clear; I wasn’t going to find the missing piece.

To focus on the missing piece meant I had to remain frozen. I had to release the moment or permit the wiperblade to cut again and again. I had to allow all the disparate parts to melt and form a new whole. They would, like the drops on the windshield, melt until no one drop was distinguishable from the others. This release, this melting, is the hardest part. It requires a warmth born of faith in yourself and in the promise that even the coldest winter will end. It requires time and a conscious choice to let it happen. It requires giving up the piece for the whole.