Manifestly not love, and yet… the soul in love turns a blind eye to the abuse, and the abuser lives in denial of their failure. You are soon deep in sympathy with J’s plight, but then you only hear their side, and J's wife's legal statements are pathologically narcissistic, unless… Even as J ends on the moral high ground, you will be left with a delicious morsel of nagging doubt.
I realised my heart hurt. Actually physically hurt, a pain in my chest in the place where it continued, in spite of my lack of wanting, its regular beat. I wondered, disinterestedly, if I'd had a heart attack. I thought about those elderly people who just stop living when their spouse passes away after forty, fifty, sixty years together. How people say they died of a broken heart. Did this pain in my chest explain why the heart is such an emblem of love? Not because it flutters and swoons in the first throes of passion, but because it contracts and constricts when your lover leaves. It's not so romantic, this explanation of an unreliable organ. The broken heart, a stress-related arrhythmia.
