Your first big heartbreak happens in your teens. Your greatest fear is failure but it's really rejection. You spend an hour each morning constructing the perfect "dressed to kill" outfit. You emerge looking homeless. No one understands you like alt rock understands you. Authenticity is measured in metric eyeliner. Your pimply, awkward body musters all its adolescent courage (for you are fearless as the dawn) to "[roll the universe] toward some overwhelming question," and the love of your life loses interest in you but wants to stay friends. You meet, for the first time, the weight of your heart. You feel it in your arms. Your throat. Your thighs. You fantasize growing translucent from the stomach outward. You hear "The First Cut is the Deepest" at the grocery store and indulge a tear, wishing the song were more musically interesting. After months of browsing self-help blogs, it happens. Your grip on the pain loosens. Your bones carry you. It's time to face the world. 
Three relationships later, you have a super-useful college degree and the world has gone to shit, taking you to your second big heartbreak. Your greatest fear is failure but no it really is failure. You spend less time choosing your outfits, but you rock it like a Target model. You've started an unhealthy addiction to social media, but you can quit any day you want to. No one needs to understand you anymore--they just need to not bore you. Screw relationships, you need to eat. Screw eating, you need to pay your internet bill. No ex has made you question your worth like the job market has. You've wept harder re-listening to Rent's "Will I Lose My Dignity" than children watching Bambi. You fantasize burning down the mansions of CEO's, cackling with your tongue flapping in the wind. You realize prison pretty much guarantees free food. And then when you're 26, you get your first full-time, livable-wage position and then weep even harder. No pain has been like the past 3 years. No one is as strong as you are right now. No one is more grateful for a shit job.
Guess it's time to care about your personal life again. Which brings you, at the doorstep of 30, to your third big heartbreak. You never thought love would be hard again. After the shipwreck your pride took aging behind a cash register, how could a thing as paltry as love reduce you, flatten you to the grooves of your couch? After learning all the lessons about need, the balance of independence and trust, becoming fluent in love's many languages. After opening up to new styles and structures of love, making your heart as flexible as oxygen, filling only the space it's allowed to fill but filling it completely. After all that, love still pelts you like sea glass. And you learned once the damage is minimal if you just sit back and loosen every muscle, let your body twist and absorb the onslaught. So grab the port and turn up The National. Your wounds are back for a ten-year reunion.
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