There’s a quiet magic that brews when two women sit down to speak – openly and honestly – about heartache, heartbreak and everything that comes along with having your heart ripped out of your chest and having to continue breathing the way you’ve always done.
When women strip themselves bare in front of each other, lay all their vulnerabilities and insecurities on the table and say ‘this is who I am, this is what I’ve been through’.
When we let the bravado go, when we allow ourselves to stop being ‘strong’ for a little while, when we get really real.
It’s a Friday evening, we’re young and beautiful and we’ve sworn to do more than politely nod and force a smile at the men the city has to offer. We swear we’ll flirt, perhaps exchange a number, meet someone new.
We’re at a hot spot, the alcohol flows freely, but somehow, the tears remain threatening just behind mascara’d lashes.
There are a couple of cuties around but we don’t even so much as look in their direction. Instead we speak of what was, what could have, should have been.
It isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve loved and lost and longed and picked myself up to do it all over again.
My friend? She’s a little newer to the game but our heartaches echo the same.
Whether after a lifetime of lovers or one epic albeit short-lived love, we women can all relate to the devastation of deception, the dull ache of disappointment.
And not only from lovers.
From friends, family, people who swore they had your back and when it mattered… Didn’t.
She’s in the middle of a story, pauses, looks off into the distance and loses her words.
I know just how you feel, love.
I know just how you feel because while I may never have loved the people you’ve loved or been through exactly what you’ve been through, but I know what it feels like to get your hopes up, against your own better judgement, give someone a chance and end up with more pain than pleasure, more hurt than healing, more tears, trials and tribulations than anything else.
“How do you do it?” she asks me a little later.
“Do what?”
“Survive.”
“Survive what? The heartache?”
“Yeah.”
“You just… Do.”
There’s a quiet magic that brews when two women sit down to say “I’m not OK”, “he broke my heart”, “I don’t know how to go on”, and then somehow… Do. Get up, get on with it.
We magic women, nothing survives quite the way we do.
– cindy@namibian.com.na;
@SugaryOblivion on
Twitter and Instagram
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