Can one capture the essence of this state?

Let me try.

I’ve been heartbroken before. You should know this. So, it is definitely not my first rodeo. But this time is different. This experience is more mature and serious than the last, not just because the relationship lasted longer and more lives are involved, but because it blindsided me.

I never saw it coming. 

This heartbreak hit me like the time I had a head-on jogging collision with a six-foot muscle mass of a man one morning at Bata. It took his holding me and several minutes sitting down to get my bearings right again. Even then, I couldn’t jog back home.

I recall nights when I lay on the couch in the sitting room (in a bid to get away from him). I had already given up fighting insomnia, tears would be streaming down my eyes, and my world was dissolving faster than I could comprehend. After nights like this, I would wake up late in the morning, my arms numb, and my legs would take several minutes to come alive.

I was scared of dying like this. And I could have died like this.

Several times, I caught myself standing in the middle of a room (could be the kitchen or bedroom), wondering how I got there and why I was there. It took the grace of God and imagining my children as motherless to pull me out of this daze.

There were days when the reality of having my children grow up fatherless would hit me like a punch to the gut, and I would find myself sitting on the floor wailing. 

Yes, wailing. For want of a better description for the kind of cry that comes from a grown woman who rarely cries. In fact, doesn’t know how to cry, has the feeling of a brick weighing down her heart, and the sound one hears from a house in mourning coming from her throat. Except, she’s not aware she’s the one wailing until her head starts to feel like it will explode. 

A dirge is the closest description. But a dirge has rhythm. There’s no rhythm here. The rhythm of her life is gone. So, she wails more, without restraint.

Then, the attacks. Oh, yes! The attacks. Not brought on by anything. Without cause, I would hear my heart loudly pumping blood through my veins with a hastened rhythm, like when I was in my third trimester. They said it was palpitations, but the tests all came back negative.

Talking about tests, the last time I visited a hospital, I had symptoms of malaria even though I had just finished a full dose of treatment meant to last three months. All the tests came back negative again.

Then, the doctor asked, “Have you been stressed lately?”.

He said the body has funny ways of manifesting stress.

I know that now. What symptoms have I not had since this became my life? Boils in unusual places that even my doctor was scared it could be HIV. There was the ulcer too, without the suspected H. Pylori. They also suspected abdominal perforation and ordered an endoscopy. But I was already tired of all the probing.

There were singular moments like the time I was sitting in a moving car – obviously resting. I wasn’t even driving, but for ten minutes, my smart watch recorded an extremely high heart rate. I felt that warning.

My mom was always watching me. Scared that I was hiding my pains, which meant that anything could happen. She told me of how I mumbled words in my sleep. Sometimes, I would hear someone screaming in my skull, till I wake suddenly and realise the someone was me. These episodes always had the accompanying feeling that someone was holding me down on the bed, and I was struggling to be free of them. They called this one sleep paralysis.

The luck I had with this heartbreak is having children. The responsibility of being their sole caregiver spared me from spiralling deeper into the depths of despair. For this and more, I am grateful to be called mother.

Inspired by The Book Thief