my heart

I’m not as kind to it as I let on. Like everyone, I know things before I admit them. I know when I am destined for heartbreak. I let the rupture go on and on, unannounced, like the recurring pains through the left side of body that I ignored and misattributed for years, knowing, deep down, that they were not incidental to being alive.

Maybe this is the self-absorbed work of an artist. Heartbreak is a grand inspiration. Its deceptions and promises have carried me through sickness of all kinds. Or maybe it is that I am a failure, and cannot make sense of how the heart works. What is an un-inflamed organ? I have never met her. I do not know if I will ever know what it feels like to be able to trust that a lover will not only admire you and caress you, but hold you bravely through it all. I do not know if this is what I was always hoping to feel. But I suspect it is.

Maybe my failing heart is saving me from anticlimax. I don’t give myself the chance to find out. When I am involved but sense that true romantic love is not happening, that I am not being held in the way I have always instinctively known is required to make the endless work of involvement worth the tides of energy I barely possess, I start to do detective work. I try to figure out what has broken this person who cannot love me—in other words, what has broken me. It’s futile work for loving—it is like looking in the mirror for clues—but it could make a great work of art. I can fill pages on why x, y and z was not to be the love of some character’s life.

Yes, it can feel like a narcissistic pursuit—why should anyone but me care? But that is art. With any luck, the asking of the most self-absorbed questions might hold in them more revealing questions: Why do we lie, hurt ourselves and harm each other, ignore and delay, manipulate, and deny? Why are we deluded, why do we scream and cry and writhe in psychic pain? And why do we transgress? Why apologize when it is not warranted?

I will never know. This is why you spend a life making things up, I imagine, which, by the way, is all I can do. I can only invent the reasons, because not even you know. That’s the funniest trick of all: You look for answers in those who by their very nature will never have them. These are your lovers. The eternal mystery of the heart is why this and not that. The eternal mystery is time, which does go, but only as far as it can. One heartbreak foretells another—or does it? Is that just the trick? I don’t know what will happen the next minute or tomorrow, and so I make it up, and I hope one day you will be able to hear me.