You know everything there is to know about the heart.
You know that if a patient presents with a pulmonic murmur that 15 of the population has them and it's negligible. You know that if somebody presents with an aortic murmur that they probably have some sort of regurg that will result in left ventricular hypertrophy which leads to left sided heart failure and then right sided heart failure and death.You know that there are medications to correct this before it kills the patient, but you also know that those medications could easily kill the patient as well.
The heart, while it's very complex you understand every last one of its intricacies.
Except for one.
The thing that people most commonly refer to as heartache.
Before you met him, you would've suspected heartache to be the manifestations of a degree of cardiomyopathy, some sort of lack of oxygenation to the heart muscle that results in angina. Before you met him, you would've assumed that when somebody said they had a broken heart that they meant they had some sort of infarction or ischemic attack.
It sounds silly, but the words heartache and heartbreak never crossed your mind as having to have anything to do with emotional attachments or love.Love in itself was a complex science that you had never mastered, nor had the desire to.
Until him.
But heartache has taken a different meaning for you.
Now you know that heartache is caused by cold glances from his eyes across a room of crowded people. You know that heartache is caused by the sound of his voice directed at everybody but you. You know that heartache is not being able to tell him exactly what it is that you want to tell him and in return he gets upset about it.
Your heart hasn't broken yet, but it's come dangerously close several times.You keep working in vain, hoping that you'll figure out the formula to make this love come easier. That you'll figure out the exact science behind it and you'll know how to make the words come easier, how to make the affection come through faster.
Sometimes you wish there were textbooks on it, because you would give up a day of surgeries to understand it.But then you wonder if love is more science or art. Some people make it look so easy, loving another person, giving their life to them.
Loving him comes easily, but your life together has never been a simple one.You long for the days where you associated heartache and heartbreak with pathology and anatomy and physiology. You long for the days where love was a science that you never cared about.
But you know that those days are long gone.
And it's only in this moment that you realize that you know nothing about the heart, and how badly you want him to teach you.