“For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.” ― D.H. Lawrence

This is the sound a heart makes when it has been broken: tinkletinkletinkle

Tinkle like glass falling within a vessel, shattering, but unsensibly contained.

I broke my father’s Stanley thermos when I was a young girl in elementary school. I walked across the “playground,” which was little more than an asphalt square, and I dropped it—fingers slipping shhhwip from the handle—to the ground. As the miniature H-bomb raced earthward, I watched mesmerized in stillness. With one mighty THWAP, the canister kissed the pavement—bottom flat—below. When I picked my father’s thermos from the sun-baked surface at my feet, I could hear them—tiny geometric shapes, tinkling in odd celebration off one another.

Tinkle.

That’s the sound.