This Business, This Project

Hardening your heart is difficult, stressful, and taxing work.

You’ve never been much good at it. You’re getting better, though, as you learn to accept how necessary this work is to your survival in a world where the heart is mostly useless anymore beyond its function as pump and plumbing.

The heart, you recognize, has always been a lazy symbol, unfairly expected to carry too much of the metaphorical burden for all the things –dreams, essentially– that people don’t really feel like believing in enough that they’re willing to actually do anything to make them possible. And every complicated, unrealistic, and fucked-up emotion or situation –the things people can’t process or express or think their way through– gets dispatched with cardiac shorthand.

You say you’re willing to predict that the metaphor of the heart as the repository for all of the finer sorts of human longings and dreams and desires (not to mention human damage) won’t survive the twenty-first century.

That’s what you say, just for the hell of it, just to say something.

But where then, if not the heart, do you pin all these things? What are they, really, and where do they reside?

They don’t reside anywhere, you say. They’re not residents. They’re exiles and nomads, traveling in your blood with their suitcases full of memories and grudges and desires. They wish the heart was a home and not just a useless metaphor. They’re what you are and what you feel and what you’ve been through; what’s been done to you and what you’ve done to yourself. They’re what you’ve allowed yourself to believe and become.

What have you allowed yourself to believe and become?

You’ll be damned if you know.

This world, this life, is constantly forcing you to relinquish your beliefs, sometimes incrementally, through circumstance and stealth and the process of growing older; other times through brutal shocks that we have all somehow agreed to call reality.

By now you’ve stopped believing in so many things. Shouldn’t you, though, reach a point where you recognize that you can’t afford to stop believing in a single one of the diminishing things you still believe in?