Heart Attack

The Pathology of Heartbreak

Tom White

Sep 30, 2025

To love someone is firstly to confess: I’m prepared to be devastated by you.
—Billy-Ray Belcourt

Above: The smooth lines of a fractured heart.

Fault Lines

The heart is ancient.
No major updates.
A relic.
More cathedral than muscle.
Old and timeless and functional.

When it breaks—
it doesn’t shatter.
It buckles.

Stone arches sag.
Dust fills the lungs.
Gradually,
Then all at once.
Until things start to die.

Prodrome

A heaviness.
Not pain.
Just pressure.

Your name on my phone—
a weight behind the breastbone.

Your voice—
nausea.

You were late—
dizziness.

Early warning,
they call it.

Nobody thinks it’s them.
I thought: stress.
Sore arm.
Acid reflux.
Ordinary things.

Angina

Silence.
Pressing down.
A thumb on a bruise.

My left arm tingled.
My jaw ached.
You turned away in bed.

I thought love meant risk.
It’s really just pressure.
Unrelenting.
So deep that
Bone remembers it.

Infarction

Then.
The words:
It’s over.

A clot.
An artery closes.

Blood denied itself.
Cells begin to die.

Muscle atrophies.
Love bleeds out.

I folded.
Time folded.
An hour.
A day.
A year—
gone in one instant.

Vision blurred.
My skin went cold.
The room spun.
I collapsed.

Acute onset.
That’s the phrase.

Collapse

Time is muscle.

Every minute without you,
cells never return.

I tried—
to breathe you back,
compress the chest,
shock it with my hands.

But there are no defibrillators for absence.
No CPR for what’s already gone.

Intervention

A balloon can open an artery.
A stent can hold it apart.

But no one
can open a memory
or resurrect what’s dead.

No bypass for grief.

You held me—
so close—
I split in two.

Complications

The doctor said:
Your heart is fine.

Printout: normal rhythm.
No damage.

But they never checked for you
lodged in the left ventricle.

No ICD-10 code for heartbreak.

The chart says: stable.

The body says: no.

If you listen,

you can hear the flatline—

Recovery

Collateral vessels appear
only when the main ones close.

Maybe love does too.

But the ache returns at night.
A phantom limb of what was once
Us.

Chest rising—
falling—
rising—
falling—

The heart is older than language.
Older than metaphor.

It beats.
It breaks.
It keeps going.

Beckett beckons:

I can’t go on.

I’ll go on—

—

–––

–––––

beat.

Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on ~~Twitter~~ X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom