I would rather have fingerprints pressed into my ribcage than carry a heart that has never been touched at all. Not a gentle touch. Not the kind that asks permission and leaves no trace. I mean the kind that grips, that leaves the outline of someone else on the inside of you, the kind that does not fade even when everything else does. The kind you can feel when you lie on your back at night and there is nothing left to distract you from yourself.
Because at least then I know something reached me.
There are mornings now where I get up to make coffee the way I have always liked it. Black. Bitter. Honest. And still, without thinking, my hand hesitates near the milk. Not because I want it. But because she did. Because somewhere in the muscle memory of loving her, I became someone who checked. And it is humiliating in a quiet, private way. Standing there, half awake, realizing that even my habits have been rewritten by someone who is no longer here to witness them. That is what people call damage. That is what I call proof.
We have been lied to about heartbreak. Made to believe it is something to avoid, something that weakens us, something that leaves us lesser than we were before. But heartbreak is not rot. It is exposure. It is the skin being peeled back so you can finally see the structure underneath. It is ugly sometimes. It is inconvenient. It ruins your appetite and your sleep and your ability to move through a day without being ambushed by a memory that does not ask for your permission. But it is honest. More honest than the sterile, untouched version of yourself that existed before.
People talk about moving on like it is work. Like it is something you must drag across a finish line. But moving on is not a task. It is a side effect. It is what happens when time keeps going and you have no choice but to keep existing inside it. It is not heroic. It is not graceful. It is brushing your teeth with a chest that still aches. It is laughing at something and then hating yourself for forgetting, even for a second, that you were supposed to be broken. It is realizing one day that the pain has not left, it has just learned how to sit quietly in a corner without interrupting everything. And somehow, that is enough.
I would choose this every time. This ruin. This reshaping. Over the alternative of being untouched. Because an untouched heart is not a safe one. It is an untested one. It is a room that has never had anyone walk through it, and so it does not know what it means to hold footsteps, to echo with laughter, to collapse under silence. It is clean, yes. But it is also empty in a way that cannot be romanticized.
The truth is, the greatest philosophies do not come from books or films or ancient words carved into something meant to outlast us. They come from the moment you realize you are not who you were before someone loved you. Or before someone left. They come from standing in your own life and recognizing a version of yourself that did not exist until you were forced to become it. No text can teach you the exact way your chest tightens when a memory hits at the wrong time. No lecture can explain the quiet strength it takes to keep going when everything in you wants to stay where it ended. That knowledge is earned. Brutally. Intimately. It is written into you, not read.
And it is beautiful.
Not in a soft way. Not in a way that makes you feel safe. But in the way a scar is beautiful. In the way something broken and rebuilt carries a kind of truth that untouched things never will.
So yes, I will take the fingerprints. I will take the habits that no longer make sense, the reflex to reach for someone who is not there, the way certain songs feel like they were written specifically to ruin me. I will take the long way around healing, the nights that stretch, the mornings that feel heavier than they should.
Because all of it means I lived something real.
And I would rather be someone who has been altered by love, even if it left, than someone who remained perfectly intact and never knew what it meant to be changed at all.
So, go out there and love without fear of being broken. Because once you experience love, there’s nothing more powerful than that feeling. You will not be vulnerable, but you’ll definitely discover yourself.
-aaditya
Aaditya Bajpai 