Takotsubo -For the Heart That Could Not Hold

It begins quietly. Not as pain— no, pain would be honest. It begins as a hush where your name used to echo, as a weightless ache blooming like smoke from a fire that has already forgotten what warmth was. They call it heartbreak, but no— this is architecture. A house collapsing inward because it was built on the trembling of your hands. Dopamine drips like slow poison. Oxytocin stains the air where you stood, soft and cruel, the way shadows are. And the heart, oh the heart— it doesn’t shatter. It folds, like paper soaked through, like a letter never sent. There is no danger here. Only the quiet violence of remembering you are gone. Fight or flight? Foolish words. Where can I flee when you are the distance? What can I fight when you are the absence? The breath that once ran toward you now leaves without looking back, a stray wind through a door I no longer close. And still, this body rehearses survival, teaches itself to cradle the empty, to wake with the knowing that some vessels were never meant to be full. Not sickness. Not wound. Just the living art of breaking without end. And God, what a beautiful ruin you’ve left me in. ---