Random Late-Night Ruminations

I am amazed by the heart's capacity to love.

How strange the heart's size--not static and unchanging. Not a mere 8" x 10" and thus only capable of holding certain amounts so that when a new love enters it, old loves are shrunk down to make room. This is not the way the heart works.

The heart grows to accomodate a new love--it triples, quadruples in size, whatever is necessary for it to house this new love without ever compromising old ones. But the old love's dimensions never change. They are ever-present just as they've always been.

I miss him.

Two dreams,one phone call, and the heart's song becomes discernible to me again.

I am happy with a new love. But the heart does not forget. This is what is so hard. Our minds are fallible--we forget, our minds falter, memory deserts us. But the heart does not. It continues to beat, continues to pump blood through these veins, pump a warm reminder of what was. And so I love him as much as I ever did.

I am able to distract myself from this love--the daily routine of living quiet's the heart's singing. But it is still there. Anger sometimes blots out its voice. But its music still spills forth. Some days I hate him. And yet still my heart sings for him--what a paradox...

And so late at night, when the night is an inhaled breath, still and quiet--it is impossible not to hear the heart's trembling notes...

"Then the heart sang in the head, softly at first and then louder,
Sang long and low until the morning light came up over..."

As time passes, memory distorts, thins out, falters. You no longer see past loves clearly through memory's eye. But you see them always with perfect clarity through the heart's eye.

The warmth of his body next to yours late at night. The feel of his stubbly jaw-line under your soft fingertips. The things he'd tell you in the night with tears in his eye. The way he would spontaneously burst into hideous dance in the middle of the living room. Even the once-annoying serves as a tender reminder--how he used cruise-control on side streets. How wrapped up in his music he could become.

These memories, their specifics may falter, and yet still they tremble within the notes of the heart's song.

Enter regret--not for past lovers but for you, for not noticing the value of these things until too late.

Such specifics, and yet I can cry at night not thinking of any specifics at all--because it is the heart and not the mind that is mourning, shapeless and infinite in its wanting.

But I'm rambling.

The heart is not this:



it is this:



endless and limitless and infinite and open.

It is the universe expanding.

"They would
Wake in the night thinking they heard the wind in the trees
Or a night bird, but their hearts beating harder. There
Would be a whistle, a hum, a high murmur, and, at last, a song,
The low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother's call.
Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song
Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness."

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