Life is simply a quest for food, food to eat, food for thought, food to trade for better food. All that we do is to get food. I come from a family where food is important. Growing up taught me to conserve. There wasn't such a thing as excess, there was just more. You stored it and when you were hungry you went hunting through the fridge for something. When you wanted something to think about, you read a book. Now what's different is the heart's search for food. The heart is cannibalistic, it feeds on other hearts. The difference is that it doesn't eat the other one, but consumes it, it swallows it in its entirety till you can't stop for feeling that yours will burst for the amount that it has. On the flip side, hearts eat each other, one heart feeding on another will be fed on by the other. It's a mutual feeding. Only when 2 hearts feed on each other, they have a habit of switching places, of replacing your own with someone else's, which you guard even more securely than your own. They fuse, so that one can't ever be without the other. That's the real meaning of a broken heart, not that your broke by itself, that there is some sort of huge gaping hole in your chest, but that your heart lost some integral piece to itself, that it was so used to being with another heart, that it's forgotten how to be alone. It extracted itself so painfully, or was forced from it's tandemnimity that along the way there was no time to put up safeguards and repair the pieces as they were taken away. Like any cheap cutting job, it never gets done as cleanly as it should be. Pieces of the other heart are left, clinging to the ragged edges of your own with a fierce tenacity that pulls at your own, pulling it down as they attempt to stop your heart from casting them off. That is why a heart is never so easy after the first time. It's different, it doesn't feel the same. The edges are rough, and changed, the shape is ruined by the pieces left clinging, and the pieces ripped out and left behind. But people change and you try again. So in the course of a lifetime, your heart has taken so many of these extra pieces, and more besides so, that it has enough extra heart to seal itself up. It's not a pretty job, and the shell that covers the hole is just as ragged and torn as the edges were the first time that it was torn. It still beats, but there's always that part that wont stretch and open as much as it used to. It forms a heaviness in our chest that is hard to get rid of. So when it is opened again, in some painful way that recalls the first time, it hurts. And we recoil from that hurt, and we try to run away from that. We guard ourselves from being hurt more, and turn away from what may lead to that. We hide ourselves and refuse to feed our hearts, because in doing so, you might lose what little is left of the heart that you used to have, that trusted and freely gave. We lose that part in defense of it, we spend so much time trying to protect that little part that we forget to use it. So when you do allow it to open, and to find another heart, you hope it's for the last time, and that this last heart can repair yours, that it can reverse this shell of other heart pieces and you can be whole again.