I Lost My Mobile At the Mall by Wendy Harmer Page A

but I didn't think it would hurt this much. Untold millions of wretched, sad people have written songs and stories and poetry about lost love. I've heard and read lots of them. But until now it was like they were talking about something I couldn't understand – like someone telling you what it feels like to walk on the moon.
    I might as well have left the earth's orbit. I feel weird and weightless. Even though I'm lying on my bed, it's as if I'm floating somewhere above a planet called Will and Elly, looking back on it through a black hole in space. The thought that I will never walk there again makes me cry until my ribs ache.
    I haven't reached for the tissues because I want to feel every tear as it runs down my face, into my neck, and soaks the pillow. I want to remember every single salty drop. My eyelids are swollen and my fingers are puffy from clutching at the blankets. If I can just hold on here I might stop myself from spinning out past the stars into eternal blackness.
    In a far-off somewhere I can hear a knock on my door and a ping on my computer. But don't they know I'm not here? I've gone. I'm drifting in an infinite cloud of sorrow . . .

Saturday night. One week PM.
Eight hours AW.
    I woke up in the early evening to find I'd slept for five hours. For about two seconds there I felt fine, but then reality hit me like a meteor strike.
    I'm not with Will any more.
    :'-(CLAB
    Now I'm on my computer and I google 'broken heart' and get 37,200,000 mentions. So there are more than 37 million of us who want to curl up and die? More than the entire population of Australia? It should make me feel better that I'm not alone. Instead it makes me feel stupid and ordinary.
    There's a knock on the door of my dungeon and Mum's head appears. She's brought me a plate of leftover, slightly charred lasagne.
    'Oh honey, I heard what happened. Are you OK?' says Mum, making the right sort of sympathetic face.
    If she really understood how I felt she'd be booking me a passage on a slow steamer to India with my spinster great-aunt. Isn't that how they mended broken hearts in the olden days? Just sent you away until you stopped wanting to throw yourself under a horse and carriage?
    Instead she stands behind my chair and pats my head until I feel like Harry the dog.
    '"The First Cut is the Deepest" – that's the name of a Cat Stevens song,' Mum sighs. 'Your Auntie Marg used to flog that song when she first had her heart broken, then she passed it on to me when I got dumped. It means that the first time your heart is broken is the worst.'
    Cat who ? I'm sure this is supposed to make me feel better, but I'm not sure how. She can't seriously be thinking that I'll be up for having this happen to me again . I'll be off working in the slums in India before I give my heart to any boy again.
    I don't say anything to Mum, but she won't take the hint and doesn't look like leaving. She's plonked herself on my doona and is cradling my pink stuffed pig. She wants to tell me all the minute historical details of her first broken heart. But, as she so often reminds me, she lived and loved in the Days Before the Internet Was Invented. She's got no idea – at all . She didn't have to endure the whole world having a grandstand view of her heart being smashed to smithereens. I hand her back her burnt offerings, tell her I'm not hungry, I'm fine and I need to be by myself.
    'Well, darling, I'm here if you need me and want to talk . . .' Mum says for the millionth time since I was nine.
    I tell her I know that by now, and thankfully she leaves.
    On my computer there are three eye2eyes from Carmelita and two from Bianca. They'll want to talk, rehash, gossip and blame. And I'm just not ready yet. I trash all of them. Maybe it was better in the old days when people had to write letters and they took three days by Cobb and Co. coach to reach you. At least by then you could open the envelope and read the letter without the print turning into an inky pond in front