SOMETHING FOR THE BROKEN-HEARTED

I saw an old friend in traffic the other day. I was on my bike—I slipped out of the west side of Forrest Park—when a rattle from my back wheel told me it was time to pull over and tighten a screw. I couched on the sidewalk with my back to the street but I was freaked out, before I got started, by a car horn. Feeling physically insecure near the curb, I quickly turned my head toward the commotion, even though it was already over. My friend was stopped there, two hands on the wheel in her dark Mazda, her sharp face straight forward and impatient with the red light at the intersection. There she was, back in my eye-line for the first time in months. If she had blown her horn, she regretted it now.

She had her heartbroken early last year. She took it very badly and, as the seasons slowly passed, was remade by her experience into someone very petty, unreliable, paranoid and cruel.

I could forgive her for allowing pain that much power. I am experienced in heartbreaks; I collected them as a younger man. One in particular often comes to mind and I am not ashamed to say that I handled it with dignity—that I took it, as I take all setbacks, as an opportunity for grace. Perhaps I also drank to excess, moaned about her to everyone in ear-shot, tarnished the beautiful girl's reputation and mine, worried my friends with frequent ruminations on our inevitable deaths and ran from the cops having screamed all night, drunk and violent to glassware in the middle of her street—and maybe that didn't happen. Maybe it was all just the dream that it feels like today.

All the while, I was gradually getting over it and coaching myself on some good advice:

• Know that one day you will be over it and that, in a year—or two, or five—your pain will feel distant, dreamlike and even a little romantic.
• Remember that there is more to a person than how they treated you. As much as you'd like to, you do not define them.
• Make note of the people you most love to make happy. They will be the best of your lovers and friends.
• And hold on tight to the idea that life's greatest pressures—for money, for love, for faith in our strengths despite evidence of absence, and the pressure to live a life worth remembering—are also our greatest motors of progress and maybe just another heartbreak or two beyond reach.