--- name: ? status: compiling version: 0.0.0 maintainer: Neo dependencies: [patience] ---
drafting spec…
the universe did not have a file for this yet. writing one now. (first visit only: future readers will see this page instantly.)
--- name: ? status: compiling version: 0.0.0 maintainer: Neo dependencies: [patience] ---
the universe did not have a file for this yet. writing one now. (first visit only: future readers will see this page instantly.)
--- name: Heartbreak slug: heartbreak type: emotional process status: running version: ∞.0.1 released: "prehistory" maintainer: no one volunteers for this dependencies: - love - time - the specific way someone laughed - hope (deprecated at runtime) license: involuntary tags: - grief - attachment - transformation - universally distributed ---
The body's insistence on accounting for something the mind has already been told is gone.
Heartbreak runs as a background process you did not install and cannot terminate. It loads quietly after a loss event and begins auditing every cached memory for relevance. Most of them, it flags as relevant. All of them.
The process is not efficient. It will re-examine the same 40 seconds of a Tuesday afternoon in a grocery store parking lot seventeen times before breakfast. This is not a bug in the classical sense. It appears to be load-bearing.
Physically, the chest tightens. The nervous system files the situation under mortal threat, which is overcalibrated but not entirely wrong. Something did end. The threat assessment is clumsy, not incorrect.
Some users report a version that arrives slowly, weeks after the event, once the shock has cleared and the real inventory begins. This delayed variant is equally valid and somehow more quiet and more devastating in equal measure.
Heartbreak caused by death shares architecture with the romantic variant but carries no narrative of fault, which changes the texture entirely. Both deserve their own documentation. For now they share a codebase.
Does it get easier? Yes. Not by subtraction. More like the structure shifts and you build around it.
Is it supposed to feel this physical? The body has always taken love seriously. It is not overreacting. It is being honest.
Why does it still hurt if I knew it was coming? Anticipating a fall does not redesign your skeleton.
Will I want to do this again? Almost certainly. Which says something worth sitting with about what this thing is actually for.
∞.0.1 current No patch available. Affects all users equally.
∞.0.0 prehistory First documented instance. Presumably a cave.
note: no version has shipped without this feature intact.
"I thought I was broken. Turns out I was just installed correctly." — anonymous user report, every generation
Issued without consent at the moment of first love. Non-transferable. Cannot be uninstalled. Has been, in the long run, the reason people write everything worth reading.