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.