After I went home for the winter and put another friend in the ground (the fifth for me in as many years; I'm starting to feel like a curse, or a magnet for self-destruction), I wrote real swoony letters to everyone I knew - the kind I usually tear up and never send.
He said I was callous for saying a a broken heart is a good thing, like a broken heart puts hair on your chest. There's evidence to the contrary, I guess; it can make you frail, it can put the fear in you for a lifetime; a broken heart can break you if you're not careful.
But I don't know any other way of feeling my mortality. I don't know any other way of hurting so hard it forces me to focus; everything is so pretty when you walk out of a funeral, I think. You forget in time that everything is beautiful, fleeting; there's suffering everywhere, and healing everywhere, that you learn to ignore.
This, not the other is what makes me callous and hard of heart: the way I hate everything, the way I ignore everything, the way I cease to wonder. Let me look at everything cock-eyed, through new eyes, and not through a shroud of tears.
Tell me how to see my life as fragile, somebody, without I face another cold body, another cold heart; I'll take back everything I said. |
