by lauriewritesDear Heart –
You really are all over the place.
You had an innocent murmur at birth, which more or less means you made an extra sound, a breather between beats. And now you’re oddly palpitating such that I can feel you in my chest, which I really wish you’d stop.
Always a risk-taker with impossible depths, you took off running a long time ago, and it takes some backwards tracing to figure out all the places you’ve landed. You’re down the hall at my parents' house, for sure, and in the two wooden boxes of dogs' ashes downstairs. You split time and space between California, Delaware, Georgia and Virginia, because that's where my people have gone, and you’re in more places in Maryland - my home - than I can track.
You've stayed behind in places where I've lost things. There are shards of you frozen in mid-air in Boston, in the southwest corner of Ohio and hanging in an apartment hallway and a cemetery, both a few miles away in either direction from where I sit. You’re in Vietnam and New Orleans, places where I've seen love and pain, and I'll cop to feeling you big time in a Denver stadium last summer. You're in the songs that make me cry. I unfailingly keep records, so you’re between the covers of many journals and all over the place in the crazy attic of the Internet. You’re in thousands of photographs, in the stories of vacations, birthday parties, sunsets, and self-portraits.
A lot of times I don't like you. You're difficult and stubborn, and you're also, in case you were wondering, not funny at all. Sometimes I (really do) think I lost you along the way. Never lucky in love, nine years - an eternity - ago, you fell in it with an utterly compelling, fairly odd, equally defensive person who seemed like the counterpart you'd been looking for since you started looking. You trusted, planned and dreamed a life when you had no business doing so, and then you sold me out. Once you met him, you were done, in spite of my need to never lose you again for no good reason. You stayed in, way over your head, for way too long. You ignored alarms, stuck your fingers in your ears and went "lalalalalala," seriously. You refused to see the obvious.
And while that’s all thoroughly and completely over now, it cost me so much for far too long. You went with him when he left, you would have crawled into his pocket if I'd let you, in spite of my best efforts to keep my center, to be okay, to stay safe and happy. I can’t forgive you yet for this. It still doesn't make any sense and it still pisses me off.
Worst of all, as a result, even if I had a reason, I can't trust your judgment and I don't know when, or if, I want to again. I can use you for the no-brainers and the necessities, for the puppies who suck you in and the family and friends who give me so much that I need whatever you can dredge up to reciprocate it. I use you for my work, for my students, for my stories, for the sheer will it takes sometimes to get through the day alongside other human beings in all the places we find ourselves together.
I use up a lot of your reserves for the news, for what I see of the world that isn't kind, and is in too many cases unbearable. I feel you. Because I still produce tears on a regular basis even though I really don't want to, I know you're there. I rely on you for awareness of what others experience, for freedom from the self-centeredness that would, if it took me over, make my life a nightmare and my value questionable.
I admit, I've wondered over the past few years how much you
can take before you shut down entirely. Some big losses have piled up, the inevitable surrender of loved ones and the crushing exhaustion that I've learned goes with it. I've had to be stronger than I felt like being most of the time, because along with the loss there's been an absence of true joy, of anything solid to replace everyone and everything that checked out. I feel sorry for you, because a lot of times you're lonely, and often you feel like your chance is past. And the effort to think that's not true, that you just have to do this or that thing to get it back, to still believe in magic and the power of possibility, sometimes feels like a little too damned much.
What I've learned is that while it may look messy in the moment, given the choice between feeling and the absence of it, I'll still try to take you, as messed up as you are. A lot of times it doesn't look very graceful. I have to ride out those hours where it feels like the black hole's opening up again, where I don't feel at all like being a team player or a good sport. Even when it doesn't look like I'm trying, I am - to reach out, to be grateful maybe, to shut up the panicky thoughts that what I've got's not enough, that what I lost was the best there was, that everything poured out through your senseless holes and nothing can and will ever patch them. And I guess even though sometimes things feel dire and old and over, together we try to foster something, anything, better than that.
I still hear the faint whoosh of an innocent murmur, pushing 40 now. An idealist and a romantic in spite of myself, I wish this were a
different letter, a love song or a poem or God help me a valentine
even, but that's just not how it's played out. I'm keeping an eye on you, and in spite of the lack of warm fuzziness lately there must be a reason I still sign my notes "xo" like my mother has since she left notes on napkins in our school lunch bags. I feel a little bit of hope, in spite of all evidence and every reason to dismiss it. Because like it or not, from what I understand of biology and other things not at all scientific, I really do need you, wild and random as you are, to survive.
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