Tiny pink hearts are all we need

Facebook has a tiny little icon of a pink heart separated by a squiggly line of space. There's a lot in the parasocial universe I haven't seen and don't understand, but that little icon made sense immediately- it's a broken heart. I'm sitting here trying to remember what it was to have a broken heart at 15. All I can really remember is that I couldn't eat for a few days. Would it have been easier to announce the heartbreak to everyone at once with just the click of a button? Or is there value in the play by play to every one of your friends? Hashing and re-hashing every detail, working it out in your own mind. Maybe that happens anyway. I suppose there's something pleasing in the way facebook would allow this communication to all of the peripheral friends; the ones that wouldn't get a first-hand account anyway. And yet, how much harder is reconciliation when all your friends have already read with their own eyes that it is done? There's very little opportunity for the "But I thought they were..."

I remember the break-up as a lonely time, early journal evidence calls the event "...traumatically dumped in Nov." There was an upperclassman named Bill. He had 5 pairs of jeans and ironed shirts for the week hung on the back of his door. He was a little dark with his slicked-back black hair and his cigarettes. I think he had a car. I was just a freshman, innocent, quiet, and fearful of authority. I was no match for Bill in the high school hierarchy. I struggled with this for a while. I kicked things. I ran until the ache in my lungs matched the ache in my chest. I fasted with emotional pain. Some of this I remember well, but most of it is a shadow of a feeling. It's an extrapolation backwards from pain inflicted since then. That wasn't my first rejection, but it was shocking in its swiftness.

The squiggly line compresses over time, eventually all but disappearing. Cliches fly out of mouths- "other fish in the sea" was my favorite. Time wears on and the events become less about her and more about how we deal. Does the little pink heart icon pulsate with new love? I haven't been around online long enough to find out, but whether the icon appears or not, tiny pink hearts will prevail.