No, Truly, It Breaks Your Heart

Never quite the bottom, and still rising. That old mystery: buoyancy. The body’s ability to float, the mind similarly gifted.

Emerging in a green world, seemingly intent on growing ever greener. The clear, bright splendor of other blooming and glistening things. The furtive kingdom, underworld, underfoot, moving in the shadows at midnight, creeping in the wet grass.

How much around us is ignorant of all the stuff that hardly matters? What do you care? How much? Show me, please. Catalog your cares. Defend your carelessness.

When the sun goes missing, gets overrun, falls, sinks –what becomes of your heart? Can you see in the dark, sense the things still moving, growing, settling, quietly disappearing? How would you characterize your retreat?

Go ahead, keep it to yourself, hold it all close. You’ll be carried along nonetheless; you’ll go somewhere whether you like it or not.

Older, you start to recognize the obvious and unavoidable things that have been there in you all along. You aren’t what you once were. The seasons startle you like never before. You can’t sleep through the sun.

And every morning you open the closet and confront your stories. Your old shoes –there seem to be more of them by the year– are your most reliable historians, prompts, the scrapbook of who and where you’ve been and what you’ve allowed yourself to love.

And the thing is, it doesn’t make you sad at all anymore, or barely.


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