Oh That Feeling

I read once, somewhere, maybe it was James Clavell, that Japanese experience the pain and ecstasy of love in their lower stomachs. I imagine it's deep in the intestines, the Japanese call it the hara.

We Westerners claim we feel love in the heart. Heartache. Heartbreak.

I read somewhere in the last couple of months that behavioral biologists or neuroscientists or some combination, studied the human response to heartbreak. Whether it happens in the hara or the heart, I don't know, but I recall that the data found that heartbreak symptoms are similar to some kinds of stresses, anxieties, or depression disorders, or some admixture of all these brain, chemically-associated diagnoses. Some of these included heart palpitations, cold sweats, and sleeping disorders. Sounds like symptoms of withdrawal.

I know where I feel it, and it's not in the heart or the stomach, although the latter takes a beating when I experience "heartbreak." I've learned that a therapeutic hit or three of a certain controlled substance - although in those quantities no longer illegal in downtown Denver - ameliorate the agita and nausea caused by the stress of heartbreak, like balm on the wound of addiction, easier than morphine. It helps me keep my appetite.

No, I feel it in my upper arms. A trigger point, it must be, where the muscles of the biceps attach to the rotator cuffs or the cap of the shoulders. It feels like sudden, acute muscle fatigue, as if I pushed the muscles past the anaerobic threshold - straight to failure. My arms fall, weakened, to my sides. Like I cannot move them.

The first time I remember this happening was when I was thirty-one years old. I was in a double-whammy problematic relationship. We worked for the same company, and we lived a two-hour plane ride apart.

Once, after we had a rendezvous in South Carolina, a vacation-weekend, except it was always vacation and it was always passionate, his plane left hours before before mine. I remember standing outside, in the airport parking lot, trying to determine which plane was his. And as that jet ascended quick, northwestward, I felt this queer pain in my upper arms, both of them. I was almost paralyzed. Tears started to well, but I short-circuited them somehow, gulped them back or something. That short choke, that catch that makes the back of your throat feel dry. For a second.

I remember it happened again, years later with one of the Erasers. We were at at the tag-end of a geophysics conference in Boston. He left before me, and I waited before I stared out from a high-floor hotel window toward Logan Airport, imagining that I could pick out his plane, this one heading due west, then southwest.

I am amazed that the same feeling happened when I watch the silliest of movies. It happened in the last couple of weeks. The Wedding Date? Ridiculous. The recent, semi-necessary remake of Pride and Prejudice - oh good lord.

The good thing, I have to believe, is that I can still experience the feeling, weak arms and all, even at a remove, vicarious, a sense memory.

Comments

[Joanne Sessler]

Hey there HH. Great writing and the adventure continues. Why would I doubt that it wouldn't?

Looking forward to reconnecting.

joanne

[Kim]

"hara"? I think I know that feeling, but for me it's usually fear that rests itself below my navel. And anger. Heartache for me is heartache. A literal squeeze from my clavicle to the top of my ribcage, inclusive. Those bones ache too and feel like they want to poke through my skin and I seem to walk around with my right hand to my collar and my left arm slid under my breasts to the elbow, to keep things where they're meant to be. I've sought therapeutic relief in the past but for me, it's all about knowing it will pass. And that I'll still be here when it does. (Although some songs can leave me clutching chest and torso, and nothing I want to admit to, either).