You just can’t let your heart die, you sob into the phone on a Friday night. You have to allow for the fact that just because you’ve been hurt once, more than once, doesn’t mean you won’t be hurt again…you can’t decide to just not feel anymore. You have to let some light in, you have to let some love out occasionally.
You have been dormant for about a year, quiet. You haven’t taken it seriously, you have not been bothered. The swirling, sucking strength of your appetite, once it’s been awakened, is therefore dizzying, and you are afraid you’ll drown in it; you have to hold tight to the edges of the bed one night so that the force of your desire doesn’t catapult you directly off the edge of the earth. You sleep in late the next morning in your big empty bed, draped diagonally, fortressed in pillows.
It’s staying light later and later every day. It’s almost spring, almost summer, and there are other loves, other hurts, just over the horizon. You will run into them and up against them, whether you want to or not –in fact you will be torn apart and stitched back together again and again until the very day you die.
I want you to want me. I need you to need me. I’d love you to love me. You, you, you. Who is this you of whom you speak? You you you. You wonder.
You text. You email. You sit in cafes and talk. You walk to work without your music, take a deep breath and grab a hold of yourself, girl. This was a near miss. You’re only lightly bruised, not broken. You got off lucky this time.
Open, closed, open, closed. That’s how your heart works.