what is stronger
than the human heart
which shatters over and over
and still lives
--Rupi Kaur, the sun and her flowers
It began with us each finding our way onto a tiny island called Tioman, off the east coast of Malaysia. Me, swimming in Monkey Bay; him, walking out of the jungle onto that same tiny, secluded beach. Me, floating on my back, eyes closed, soaking in the sun; him, shooing away the monkeys rummaging through our backpacks and stealing away with our sunscreen and chewing gum. It was a fairytale beginning, like the childhood dreams I’d long outgrown.
That was 15 years ago. Today I’m sitting in the hospital waiting for a follow up echocardiogram after suffering a broken heart. At 42, sadness shocked my heart, slowing its rhythm so much, it beat at a resting rate when I was exercising. For my first heart echo, the doctor had me bicycle up several ‘hills’ while a technician prepared a smooth ultrasound paddle, slathering cold gel on the surface and then moving roughly above, around, and below my breast, blindly, beneath a faded blue hospital gown, open at the front, while I lay in reclined bicycle pose, legs pedaling. Later, the doctor scrolled quickly through several images on a computer screen as I sat next to him in a tiny office, partitioned from the exam room by plexiglass. He stopped at an image that showed my heart at rest, before the bicycle ‘ride’. “See this, it’s pumping blood through too slow. The outer edge of the valve is thickened here.” I stared back, not sure what this meant, waiting for him to explain. Instead he asked, “Do you drink excessively?”
Outside of binge drinking in my early twenties? “No.” I replied.
The sun slowly fell into the sparkling, aqua-pink horizon as I sat waiting at the only bar on our stretch of Tioman Island beach, a small island off the coast of Malaysia. When I spotted him in the distance, walking up from the beach, my stomach dropped like it did when I was a child on a swing, pumping my legs hard, swinging high; then down really fast and whoosh, it drops and my heart is simultaneously in my throat, beating to a new rhythm. He was still dripping from his swim, chestnut colored hair, wildly constructed by saltwater; I couldn’t contain my eagerness to spend time with him. “Hey, I was beginning to think you weren’t coming,” I said as he approached.
“Wouldn’t miss it,” he replied and smiled a broad, playful grin as he sat down across from me.
It occurs mostly in women, this syndrome, weakening the left ventricle and sometimes causing the heart’s main pumping chamber to fail. The rest of the heart goes on, perhaps overworking to compensate. The injury can be caused by severe emotional or physical stress; the loss of a loved one, a diagnosis of an illness, an accident, or natural disaster; it brings on sharp chest pains, shortness of breath, light-headedness, fainting.
“Can you have a heart attack from stress?” I asked the ER doctor. He had no idea the kind of stress I was experiencing; I appeared to be a healthy woman, in her late thirties, early forties, he’d guessed.
“It’s not common, but sometimes when older people lose a partner, the other one dies soon after from a heart attack. Like they died from a broken heart,” he replied.
Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy, also known as Broken Heart Syndrome, can be reversed. I am relatively healthy, so I will recover.
I have two photos of us taken about a half an hour into that first evening on Tioman. Only one of us in each photo; we are looking at each other, arguing playfully. Politics? Or the rules of Euchre?
“Have you even played this game before?” I ask.
“No, but it’s very similar to another card game I play, called 500. We can play that next.” My face is pink, from a day in the sun, the beer on my lips. And blushing. I am blushing at a boy whom I never planned to meet, and I will play any game he asks me to.
This syndrome takes its name from the Japanese fisherman's tako-tsubo, a balloon-shaped octopus trap, which is what the left ventricle of those affected resembles. Eighty percent of people will recover from Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy. I lie in the center of the king size bed he left, just weeks after buying it for us. My stomach writhes in pain; I push my fist into it, rolling it through, angry that my body is succumbing to an anxiety that has manifested in physical agony. I take deep breaths and imagine becoming a tree, arms outstretched to the sky, taking in the warmth of the sun from the tips of my fingers to my toes; one of a few calming techniques my therapist taught me to navigate during the early stages of a panic attack.
We stayed up well into the morning hours, learning each other’s stories beneath a blanket of stars on the beach. We scribbled lists of poets and books and films the other should read or watch. Rolling out one-rupee banknotes from his pockets, he wrote our lists on them as I dictated. ‘Alice Walker, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde…’ He started his list for me on another note, ‘Clockwork Orange, Breathless, Y Tu Mama Tambien…’ We watched the sun come up and I walked back to my bungalow, slipping into bed before my roommates woke. He would leave that morning for Kuala Lumpur. I will probably never see him again, I thought as my head hit the pillow.
What was the moment when my heart broke?
Was it the moment he admitted to cheating on me, with xxx, for years?
Was it later, when he told me he needed to date xxx and then started doing just that?
“I am xxxxxxxx,” he looked at me, with guilt. Not for who he was, but for what he had done to find, to acknowledge, that person. I barely heard him through my own guttural sobs; the basement futon, where he’d been sleeping the past couple of nights, slowly closed in on me. No amount of rocking could calm the devastation that started to wash over me. No amount of tears could measure the anguish I felt gripping my heart.
The initial disclosure that winter night, almost three years ago now, was the beginning of a very long, unwinding of the previous eight years, the entire time we had lived in Toronto.
I had no idea.
“So, what does that mean for us?’ I asked him a week later, from our shared bed, unable to rise up to do much more than get the kids ready for school, where I would retreat again once they had left the house.
I knew it wasn’t over. I wasn’t giving up.
“I love you tremendously. I don’t want to lose you,” he pleaded. “I never wanted to replace you.” He was lost. I knew this. I could see it in his eyes. Those bright, hazel eyes that had mesmerized me when we first met in 2004.
“I don’t know where we go from here.” Tears streaked my face. I felt a weight on my chest making it difficult to breathe. Pulling in the deepest breath I could, I slowly let it pass through my lips in an attempt to keep my heart from cracking open again further, but I kept gasping for air.
It turns out he is younger than me, by five years. I had left the States four years earlier to teach at a private school on Saipan Island, my first international school teaching experience. He’d just graduated with a journalism degree in Melbourne, Australia. He was a baby and his journey to himself was just beginning. Mine was well into the next phase. I was finishing up a three-year stint in Bangkok, Thailand, teaching Grade Three. I was deciding where to go next. He wanted to be on the front lines, where the action was. It all sounded very brave and exciting. He wanted to experience and tell big stories. I found his thirst for politically charged world events attractive. I was furiously scribbling in my journal about this boy I’d met the night before when a shadow appeared over my table at the café near my bungalow.
Met a pretty cool guy last nite/yesterday afternoon. Xxx. Scorpio. Young ->22, just graduated uni. and traveling. from Melbourne. Beautiful eyes. barbell piercings in both nipples and belly button. I wish I could have seen him before he left. Funny. Here he is…April 14 (2004)
“Hey, I’m headed to KL today,” he said, looking down at me through squinted eyes. “I’m headed to that protest, want to come along?”
I did. I wanted to see where he would take me; but I’d made a commitment to my friends. It was our last trip together before I moved on to a new job, in another country, not yet determined, “Thanks. But I’m going to finish this holiday with my friends. How about you look me up when you come through Bangkok?”
The night before we take off our wedding rings, almost fifteen years to the day we met, I ask him to sleep in bed next to me, one last time. We lie almost naked and I curl up into his arms, head resting on his shoulder, arm draped across his chest. Our breathing slows and syncs. Neither of us is sleeping yet. I can feel his heart beating beneath the palm of my hand.
Against my closed eyelids I see us young and in love. We are riding off into the English countryside to our newlywed bed at a cozy B&B in the idyllic market town of Oundle, where a single road winds through old stone row houses and small local shops, about an hour from Cambridge University. Our cheeks are rosy, our eyes twinkling. Just married in the single room church in which T.S.Eliot wrote much of The Four Quartets, in Little Gidding, nestled in next to a few mature trees, an expansive view of hay fields in the distance. Another chapter in the fairy tale.
I spent the bus ride back to Kuala Lumpur, where my friends and I would catch our return flight to Bangkok, filling my journal with poetry and ruminations on this boy I had met. I met lots of boys during my time in Bangkok and various jaunts to the beach, but this one was different. This one I could actually imagine seeing again. And more than once.
Once we disembarked the bus at the busy terminal in KL, my friends and I navigated through a sea of people, against the tide, to find a cash machine. We pushed our way through and stood in a lineup of about a dozen others. Managing large crowds, with little allowance for personal space, had become second nature. I scanned around the terminal, sun shining through the open windows. Hot pink bougainvillea trees waving in the breeze. It felt sticky inside the open-air terminal, stagnant. Smells of Laksa and Malaysian peanut curries wafted in from the street vendors and glanced at one another, stomachs grumbling after the five-and-a-half-hour bus ride.
As I looked across a wave of faces, there he was. My jaw dropped. My heartbeat raced. My palms sweaty. Our eyes locked and everything else melted away. The chatter of languages fell aside, the white noise faded into the sound of my heart beating against my chest. Somehow, two days later, in a densely populated city, here we were in the same place.
Fate.
I wasn’t sure about it before, but in this moment, I believed in fate whole heartedly. There was no doubt in my mind that I would hear from him again when he came through Bangkok. And I did.
A decade and a half later and we are not so young and hopeful anymore, but still hold on to the comfort of a long-time love. It is a love that has withstood a lot of beatings along the way. Nazareth: the intensity of drones, border control guards, old world plumbing, and living together too soon after we met. Schaffhausen: a year teaching in a small village near Zurich, while he worked nights media monitoring in East London. London: our son born not breathing, later diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Melbourne: more tests for our son, and a seizure disorder diagnosis. Cairo: dropping the foreign correspondent dream on the cusp of a revolution to relocate for better services for our son’s health needs. Toronto: the perfect birth of our daughter, fighting for the right to settle in Canada. There were nights filled with tears, harsh words, and silence, but our commitment to each other and our kids never wavered. I never once imagined that some of his late nights at the office, under the guise of covering breaking news, were instead spent meeting up with xxx to explore and sate his desires that I, as a xxxxx, could not.
On our last night as husband and wife, he agreed to sleep next to me as we both let go of that youthful, dreamy love, closing the loop of commitment from the first night we wore our rings, to the last.
By the time he came through Bangkok, we’d already been exchanging steamy emails for several weeks. It wasn’t but a few days into his visit when he exclaimed, “I think I love you!” I didn’t know what to do with this bright, beautiful soul, bursting with love for me, a woman who had turned quite cynical and was not ready to believe in true love again.
After several Beer Singh, the following night on Khao San Road, the place to be in Bangkok for farongs (foreigners), we discussed ‘what if’s’ including “I would definitely have your baby if I ever accidentally got pregnant.” I remember it so vividly; he was on the street and I was on the curb, we were facing each other, kind of like playing a game of badminton, bouncing scenarios back and forth, and then we sat down side by side on the curb and he didn’t even ask me. I just blurted it out, just like he had confessed his love for me. This was monumental for me, because at that time, I absolutely didn’t want a baby or a husband. Ever.
When we woke the next morning there was a heaviness in the air and anxiety in our stomachs. Our daughter had climbed between us in the middle of the night, her six-year-old legs sprawled over both of us. I carefully moved her leg and climbed out of bed, heading downstairs to take care of our son. We take turns doing his pre-breakfast reflux meds and getting him toileted and dressed for the day while the other gets his breakfast, supplements, and seizure medication ready. I put the kettle on; we meet in the kitchen. “Do you want a hug?” he asked.
“I do,” I whispered. He asked because sometimes I didn’t want one. We shared a hug. He kissed me on my forehead. My heart fell to my stomach and back up again as my head rested against his chest, and his chin rested on the top of my head, a perfect fit of our two bodies. The kettle boiled and he made me a cup of his freshly roasted coffee. And then we did what we do every morning together, we got the kids ready for school.
After a couple of weeks with me in Bangkok, he was headed for Laos and I asked him to meet me in Vietnam after I finished teaching summer school. It would be my third time and I felt confident I could make my way there on my own and find him, after all I’d been in South East Asia for three years.
After a successful first trip traveling together, we returned to Bangkok, where I decided to decline the job offer in Mexico City, send my belongings home, and continue traveling with him, “I’ll go to India and Nepal with you, if you’ll go to Myanmar with me.” It was the one place I had wanted to visit and hadn’t made it there yet.
“Agreed.” It was settled.
I was officially going to follow my heart.
I look around at the other patients in the waiting room at the heart clinic at St. Michael’s hospital, the hospital where my daughter was born, the perfect birth, after her brother’s own traumatic entrance into the world. I am the youngest one here. It’s almost a year after my visit to the ER due to my broken heart.
I squeeze my fists together, palms sweaty from nerves, and then open them to smooth out my long, Jimmy Choo dress from the “end of season” rack at Nordstrom Rack, the one I purchased that day after he’d dropped me near the subway station after another couples’ therapy session. I’d gone shopping; he’d gone on a date with the college professor, the one he hadn’t told me about yet.
I glance up as the young technician stops in front of me, handing me a gown to put on for an EEG. We talk about my anatomical heart tattoo on my right forearm, the one with peonies growing out of it, putting life back into something that was broken. A gift to myself the previous Valentine’s Day, when the broken heart was still very fresh and in early recovery.
Five minutes later, I’m back in the waiting room, holding my gown tightly in front, with the EEG lines jumping in a rather predictable pattern across the paper on my lap, wondering whether those lines should be added to my collection of tattoos. I’m waiting for the next exam, the one where they put gas into my vein to get a better look around the shadowy places of my heart from my last echo, a contrast echocardiogram.
We started in Myanmar, went on to Nepal, and finally landed in India, where we’d gotten six-month visas. We’d planned for an adventure without limits; there was a lot of ground to cover. It was in Dharamshala, India that he received word his application to work for a media organization in Nazareth, Israel-Palestine, had been accepted, so after three months travelling together, we cut our trip short. A weekend stayover in Bangkok while he prepared for his internship and I prepared to return to Michigan, where my family was, to decide what to do next.
I had no desire to enter into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict zone. But a month and a half later, I would join him, as a volunteer teacher at an Arab-Palestinian school in Nazareth. We would live together in the Old City, just down the winding, cobblestone path from the Basilica of the Annunciation, where the virgin Mary had been told she would have the son of God.
We had known each other just over half a year, and we found ourselves sharing a mattress on the floor of a very damp, one bedroom, stone apartment at the top of the hill from the Nazareth Weekend Market. He took me places I never thought I would go.
It felt strange, the gas. They told me I would just burp it out. But instead, it made me wheeze. I stood at the bus stop outside the hospital, unsure if I should go back in. The air was cold; I could see my breath. I imagined watching the gas float out of my mouth, but then I felt like it was stuck at the same time. Was this a normal reaction? Was something really wrong with my heart?
I felt so tired for the rest of the day, though eventually the gas did leave me and the shadows on my heart became brighter and I was told that I was ok now. I don’t have that piercing pain in my heart anymore. I don’t have panic attacks as often. Heart pain is different than panic pain. Both make breathing shorter and more difficult. But heart pain is piercing and it doesn’t stop. Because I’ve had both, I know the difference. The first ER doctor told me I probably just had indigestion. When my EEG came back irregular, only then did he start to ask serious questions. Only then was I referred to a heart clinic.
“It doesn’t matter that my biological father had a pacemaker? I think he’s actually on his third,” I reminded my doctor. His father had died at 47 of a massive heart attack. The doctor said my heart was different; our hearts needed different things. Pacemakers help remind the heart when to beat to create a regular rate; broken hearts need to speed up. This explanation was supposed to calm any further doubts or fears. I’m not sure it did.
At a follow up appointment with my family doctor, I was instructed to put an aspirin under my tongue and call an ambulance or get to the ER straight away if I had chest pains that didn’t go away when I lay down, or shortness of breath combined with lower back pain and light headedness. That I would have another ultrasound in a couple of years as follow up. Just to be sure. Because my heart still beat a little slower than average. But I was going to be ok.
According to my doctor, my clinically broken heart had healed.
The new normal keeps changing and there are more stories to write. There has been love and loss and love again. I don’t really know any other way to describe how it felt to have the person I loved the most, the person I left everything for, the person I built my life with, far from home, to create a new home, the person that fathered my children, betray me in the way that he did, for so long, other than it broke my fucking heart.
And I survived.
*Note per the author: “He/him now uses they/them pronouns and recognizes that this version of our story is mine to tell in a way that makes sense to me and my own identity; however, going forward all pieces will address them with their new pronouns.”
Kara Melissa (she/her) is a transplant Torontonian and mama of two (teen and tween). A former international teacher, she became a full-time stay-at-home mom when her son was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. A regular contributor to a community of bloggers of parents of kids with disabilities, she also runs free/pay as you go workshops for other parents of disabled/complex needs kids. Her work has appeared in Today’s Parent, The Mighty, Medium, among other places. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Nonfiction, from Antioch University LA and is a 2022 recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Project Award. She’s just launched her website at karamelissa.com, if you’d like to learn more.