Hearts

Saturday 12/2/23

"Maybe I’m built to be a mess, or I sub-contracted a portion of myself for the job of turning the whole of me into one, but that’s not enough in my view, even if I could do it. I don’t think there’s anything to like right now. I’m not grateful. I’m not thankful I’m alive. I’m holding out for something else. A something else that I try to believe in. I may be making my life worse, but that’s not what my heart says, though I fear that my heart is in denial and that both it, and I, know better, only we keep stringing something out. But what? And why?

"There are times, I have learned from experience, that your heart is all you’ll have. I think I’ve become like that now. All heart, but not as cheery as that sounds like when someone says, 'Aunt Betty was all heart,' at the start of the roll call of valued remembrances.

"Your spirit can go. And your will. Your head, too. Your short-term memory. You get scatterbrained. Overwhelmed by what previously didn’t rate as anything significant, never mind qualified as an obstacle. You don’t think straight. To enter a room brings with it a mystery as to why you’re there. And the mystery carries with it a bigger question that uses the same words. Questions hefting questions on top of questions, with that one question of questions at the bottom buckling in the knees as if it’s about to give out before an answer comes, or you are.

"But the heart tries to hang in and not leave. Keep the lights on as late as possible. It’s the scrappy puncher who won’t stay down unless put down. The part of you that is loyal the longest. Too long, sometimes. Longer than we wish.

"Which is why a broken heart feels like it does as it keeps reaching for that which it can no longer hold. And why you’d do just about anything for a remedy, including die in exchange for one if presented with the right offer at the right weakened moment, or panicked moment, drunken moment, or brave moment that might actually be a cowardly moment, which is not the same as a replacement because we are every bit as loyal to our hearts as they are loyal to us.

"We want our hearts to be our hearts, and no one else’s save the people we give them to. If they are shredded, we still want them to be ours so that they can be whole again.

"Is that good? I guess it can be. I want it to be. But that’s not where I am right now."

* From "A Listener's Story"/Big Asks: Six Novelettes About Acceptance