I have transcended the broken heart. Mine is malignant. A cancer of loss eats away at it from the center. It reeks of decay and where it is pink, it is the unhealthy pink of feverish distention. Those are mere symptoms, though, as the cause is even more insidious.
That which diseases my heart is loss; loss of friends, of lovers and love itself. God, that four-letter word: love. When one reads or hears a word or phrase or sees a picture and one is reminded of something else, it is called allusion. When I hear or read or think of the word love, the allusion my mind makes is loss, suffering and the purest agony. I feel my soul rend. I feel my heart turn cancerous as it begins the arduous, deliberate process of devouring itself.
Heartbroken? Not I. I am heart-blackened; blackened with self-loathing, with all-encompassing, pathetic self-hatred.
If you don’t get the idea, the full picture yet, let me paint it for you. Imagine this:
You are looking through some sort of looking glass, a microscope if you will. It is set to maximum magnification. At first look, you see horned and betoothed cells viciously attacking one another, biting and rending seemingly at random. Lessen the magnification a little, and the cells seem to merge into a black and gray putrid mass of squirming, seething, bile-like almost-flesh. It seems to be retching and yet unable to settle and heal. Pan back even more, yes, that’s it, way back. A little more… More… There, you’ve got it! The entire muscle, or what’s left of it, is now framed in your monocular vision. Had you a strong stomach, your steady gaze would bring you a vision of purest horror, far worse than anything Hooper or Raimi or Baker could conceive. The heart itself is nearly unrecognizable. It is four-fifths cancer, the blackness of the diseased center purposefully endeavoring to consume the rest. Instead of emptiness where the cancerous growth obviously began, you would see a thriving mass of anti-heart, of malignancy incarnate. It writhes and shudders, as its only purpose is the consumption. The outer edges are violently pink and red-hot with the fever of sickness. There is no doubt, as your horrified eyes comprehend the truth of what you see, that the rest of the heart bears no chance of salvation, of healing. The malignancy is too embedded, too extensive. There is no hope of separating the bad cells from the good: if the bad cells were to be cut away, the rest would collapse into uselessness, so much primordial sludge to taint the soul. There is nowhere for the malign cells to retreat.
Thus, you have a fair description of my state of being. Being hurts. I find hope excruciating. To me, memory is a wretched souvenir of my every failure to love and be loved. Happiness is so distant a phenomenon as to be considered fiction; I know I have been happy in the past, but it is now so long ago it may as well be the distant remembrance of someone else’s narrative.
I am a burden.
I am consumed with sorrow, saturated with hopelessness.
I am pathetic, unworthy of pity.
Were my truest wish granted at this moment, it would be for nonexistence. Dying would only bring me to another level of consciousness and the fear of this all-consuming malignancy transcending with me is too real and all too probable for me to risk it. Nonexistence is the only comfortable thought. Here one moment, never having existed the next.
And yet, such relief is not to be.
Do not feel sorry for this diseased traveler. No, don’t you dare! For, I have brought all this unto myself, all by myself. I blame no one but me and me alone. Only I am liable.

If you are happy, I entreaty you with every milligram of my existence to make the absolute most of your joy. Go into the world and gift your bliss to everyone you meet. Be that smile that changes moods. Be that energy that people find irresistible. Be love and happiness and bliss and comfort and enormous peace. I beg you. Please, from one who has lost everything and who has nothing but nothing to show for thirty-six-plus years of toil and adversity to another who, hopefully, finds all of this despair foreign, please embrace nirvana and run full-tilt into the light of being as if there is nothing to fear and less to loose.

~s~