Tell me, what does it mean to be afraid of your own heart?
I’ve got a friend in sales who tells me she can always tell a call will convert when she asks, “How are you?” and they ask her back. My jaw tightens because these perfect strangers on the phone are asking my friend about her day, and I can only remember all the times you didn’t ask me.
Teach me how to cut you off at the knees with the same precision that I cut the stems off the sunflowers I bought myself. Yes, I know I’m scary in the way that I’m always one decision away from something you can’t control, but I’m still soft. I’m still human.
Lately I’ve been so human in hopes someone will treat me like one. Lately I’ve been so soft that I rot. Indifference is a foreign concept, but sometimes it shows up and slides in as a placeholder on the days my rot needs to stay in bed.
I found something I wrote that says, “For apathy, take a good dose of memory and it’ll remind you there are things that you care about.” It’s too easy to mock the mood I must have been in when I wrote this. Perhaps it's half true – but we all know that a good dose of anything can be fatal. And a dose that’s just right is transient. Maybe when someone yells that you are temporary, it takes you about as long to believe them, as it takes you to throw out the pistachio bag of memories in the backseat. For transparency, I let that bag sit there tucked under the passenger seat for much longer than I’d like to admit.
You see, my head is just stuck and I’ve been mumbling Closing Time everyday after work for the past two months. “You don't have to go home but you can't stay here.” I can’t stay here. I know who I want to take me home, and it's not you. It's a blonde girl with a heart the size of the sun and she’s begging me to let her be nice to me. Self-love often feels like an uphill battle.
I have a document I am always adding to that’s titled, “silly things that I felt weren’t silly at the time.” Stupid is probably a more accurate word than silly, but I was trying to be nicer to myself the day I named it. Most of the things on those pages I can smile at now. Some still feel like needles.
There are so many kinds of love. There’s the kind you share sitting around a campfire with good friends and a guitar. It’s wonderful, but I don’t know when the night is over if you’re supposed to put out the fire or just let it burn out? Which is less painful? There’s the kind you feel draining from you as you drive away from someone and keep looking in the rearview mirror. There’s the good dangerous kind that takes over your whole body and turns you into a sugary tenderness. The one where the boy knew it, knew you were hungry for love, and under June moonlight he took the tenderness, melted it down and fed it to you in spoonful’s. Then there’s the bad dangerous kind, the one that turns your reflection into a monster. The one that makes you search WebMD for reasons why you’re nauseous all the time. Sometimes, all these kinds of love can be felt simultaneously.
The other day was a well-timed concurrent nod. The one you exchange when it’s raining and you forgot your umbrella and you walk past someone else who forgot theirs too. The one you give when you’re standing next to someone else in the get-well section of the card aisle. The other day was last Sunday realizing we’re all in the same boat and nobody can figure out how to stop it from sinking. The radio is screaming quit playing games with my heart and I’m looking the other way. Somewhere somebody is shaking their head. Tell me, how do you write yourself into the poem where the girl finally takes her own advice?
“There are some things in life you just can’t put down:
a good book, a good love,
a cute puppy, a cute baby,
your foot, your phone,
a pen, a weapon – if that weapon is a lover’s heart
and everyone is screaming at you to drop it.
Surrender
– but even the white flag reminds you of them.”