Stop the world, I want to get off.

You like to think you’ve changed, but know that in a lot of ways, you haven’t changed at all. You’re still stupid, still think you can have control over your life, over what happens and who you let yourself care about - as though the heart has some sort of power button, a dimmer switch with the ability to bypass mistakes and regrets and skip out on the bad memories of the past that you can never seem to really ever let go of.

They keep resurfacing. And the time it may take for it all to really go away feels like too much. Infinitely too much.

Until time and feelings are all wrapped together in one hurdling mass, headed right for your heart, causing it to explode. And then you look at it, in little pieces on the floor, sections of days and months and moments. There it is. Your life staring back at you, showing you everything you did wrong, everything you regret, everything that now, seems so painfully clear.

Stay away, the pieces show you. Run. You will only get hurt. But when it comes to our hearts, we don’t know any better, and we always think that we do.

It creeps up on us when we least expect it. The sound of a name or the scent of an old perfume, and suddenly we’re back there, in the thick of our almost tangible memories, when our hearts were still intact, before the damage was done.

We go on. The bruises heal and this strong muscle keeps beating no matter how much you say you don’t care anymore if it stops. It repairs. It inwardly fixes itself, and you find you’re unable to let anything come near it: no caffeine, no trans-fats, not one day without exercise.

You tell yourself you have no choice now put to protect it. And so you continue on. Careful, guarded. Your heart in an icebox. Preserved. Protected. Numb. You don’t know if that will change. So you stop asking yourself the question.

It is what it is and there’s no going back, no stopping the world. And in the time it took for it to fall apart you think it will take five times as long for it to come back together again. Because it’s always easier to break something than it is to rebuild it. In the heated emotional moment it takes to throw a punch - hours have to follow in order for the swelling to go down, weeks for the bruise to fade. And that little scar in the corner of your eye never seems to ever really go away.

It lingers. A constant reminder of our mistakes, our lost opportunities, our bad luck, our bad timing or whatever it is that makes certain things happen to us at the moments they do. But we move forward. We have no other choice. We eventually accept that it is what it is, that there’s no going back, no stopping the world.