The Heart Paradox

 To The Lady on the Train,

The heart is a muscle that is in may ways just like any other muscle in the human body, yet it is also very unique. The heart begins beating months before we are born and it will continue beating until we die. For this function it does not require thought or attention or encouragement; it will continue to pump as it is designed to do. But a heart is so much more than just a muscle. It is the vessel where we store love, and in this capacity the heart is magic.

Pride for your children could not fit inside a stadium, yet the heart expands to hold it all. Love for friends and family could not fit in the oceans, yet the heart holds it all. And the love we have for the one we love most could not be contained in all the stars in all the galaxies, yet the heart holds it all.

But for all of the heart's capacity, endurance, and strength it is fragile. A heart can be broken with an unkind word. A heart can be shattered by malice, ignorance, or plain stupidity. A heart can be worn down by neglect and abuse. It is something that we do without ever knowing it.

The human condition means that we will love and be loved. We will break hearts along the way no matter how hard we try not to. In the process we will shatter our own hearts. We will also help to heal broken hearts and tend to our own injuries. This is what it means to be human.

When two broken hearts come together the pieces can get mixed up. A heart heals with some pieces of another. I have broken your heart and my own, and I carry pieces of you with me. I have patched and chinked and held together this heart with pieces I stole from you. I will carry these pieces and cherish them. You are now and forever the better part of me.

The hearts greatest strength is its fragility.

Always,

The Man in the Station

Winter Weight

 In one weekend we have crossed an invisible threshold into a winter. The clocks have changed and somehow the dark seems even darker. The temperatures have fallen and somehow the cold feels even colder. The nights are long and already feel longer. It feels as though we have fallen into an unending night.

Halloween passed without the usual magic of small and excited ghosts, princesses and super heroes crowding the front door with opened pillow cases. It passed like a whisper with only a few rotting pumpkins as sentinels to have watched it. The candles snuffed, not to be relit.

We have crossed this threshold and in the crossing it feels as though something we cannot quite grasp has been left behind. There is a loss in the crossing and we are unsure that there has been anything gained. Like a child having dropped unnoticed a favourite teddy bear on the street, we continue on and the only thing growing is the distance.

I busy myself in the routine of work and the mundane chores of cooking and cleaning. I bake my bread in the hopes that the miracle of flour, salt, water, time and heat will instill in me the curiosity and wonder that it once held. The bread is improving as I become more proficient but this does not translate to satisfaction and I am at a loss to understand why.

Perhaps the feeling of loss is nostalgia for the days before covid. The days when children could run around a dark and spooky neighbourhood demanding candies from willing adults. Or perhaps it is just that I am older by another year and feel the cold just a little more sharply.

Or it is knowing that this winter will be long and knowing this has scooped me out. And tonight it is only a cold wind to fill the space. That, and fresh bread.

Memory in the time of coronavirus

 Angel,

It has been the strangest year; 2020. Or perhaps it has been the strangest decade it is only now that everyone else has noticed too. I have trampolined all over the past decade or more.

Time is a strange substance. It can take a moment and let it stretch out to infinity; or it can take a decade and compress it into a flash of a memory.

There was once white limbs and a freckled back, the round contours and the tangle of curls of my heart in the shape of a woman next to me. There were eyes that hinted of wonders and a smile to outshine the sun. There were tears and laughter and pain and exultation and strong black coffee. There was chaos and quiet, and there was the constant ebb and flow of time and we could only move along with it. Even now, I can sometimes let myself be drawn into the depths and mysteries of you. I now walk through those wonders more like a ghost than a visitor. I cannot tell if I am the haunter or being haunted; perhaps it does not matter.

Time is a strange substance and it rolls in like a mist, blurring the shoreline of your memories. And yet you remain, a lighthouse. I still see you.

Just me