My heart is tired.
Not from pumping blood but from expelling love, and then watching that love drip into the cracks and dry up on the sidewalk.
There’s the pervasive, every flowing acts of love: caring for kids, near and far, holding that low grade worry that they’ll break their pencil and not have another one, that they’ll be left out of the circle.
And then, the painful acts: caring for my ailing mom, witnessing time take hold of everyone I know, my heroes of childhood, my family, my neighbors’ parents, me.
The unacknowledged acts: throwing a smile at the schizophrenic woman on the street, letting someone merge ahead of me, getting off the couch to make spaghetti.
And so many more: the selfish acts, the heroic acts, the confusing acts, the desperate acts, the unexpected acts, the openly showy, unjustly dismissed acts, the hidden acts, the misunderstood acts…
But then, as if all of these expulsions of love aren’t enough to tire my poor heart, there’s this constant pressure around it — not my doing! — a squeeze that’s grabbing onto all our hearts right now: the people who don’t care, who also happen to be in charge.
They seem to have tireless hearts.
Or no heart at all, which I guess are one and the same, or at least allow for very similar acts.
I wish I could give my heart a rest, not figuratively, I mean literally.
Pull it out and put it on ice, or in a hot bath, I’m not sure what my heart would prefer. Cold gentle hands around it sound nice, a soft stroke with a single fingertip.
I’d love to see my heart up close. I get the sense it would make me cry, seeing that thing that’s behind all of this, a small, modest knot that’s been working so hard for me all this time.
For me.
And this heart, the one that’s in my chest, pumping my blood, and doing whatever it does to make me the way I am; it deserves a rest.
It deserves to know what it’s up against.
Or maybe it’s better that it doesn’t, like a runner who focuses on the next step and not the next mile.
Doing the impossible in tiny increments.
Bump, bump…. bump bump
Maybe that’s its secret.