I dunno. I guess I'm wondering what makes hearts break.
I was walking the other night, past dorm rooms and a lyric sprung through my head "I'm waiting here for something new to break my heart..." -jars of clay. And I recoiled. No, not now. Not now...
I guess I'm wondering what it is that causes cracks and schisms, which in turn allow enough room to begin placing space and tension in that crack to cause it to become larger, to eventually break or to have fragile potential to.
How susceptible am I to it?
How does it snake its way into other's hearts?
I mean, sometimes this is good. Sometimes I need my card houses to fall and for the horizon to flip, for the land and the sky to invert. I'm human. I build houses that were never meant to be built and therefore since I created them, they now have a purpose, and that purpose is to collapse. Because I built them.
So that breaks my heart. When those houses fall, the heart is cracking. Yet actually, when they're built is when it begins to split. Ahh, when I build those houses is when I take it into my own hands and understanding, and doing that is abrasive to the smoothness of this beating metaphor. I crack when I build. I break when it falls. And then ironically, everything feels like you'd think it should always feel. It feels right, it feels humble, it feels meek... it feels right.
But it's so hard to keep taking that step back. To keep feet grounded and mind clear.
To feel things, to know things, and to then realize that perhaps what you felt was out of line, and perhaps what you knew, you didn't know at all. The knowledge manipulating the emotion, the emotion manipulating the knowledge.
And perhaps your reliance on these things, for so many years, was unhealthy, untrue and dissatisfying... even when you thought it was right.
Maybe it's best to tear it down and walk away. To sit down while it rains and let it dissolve everything off of you and just listen. Just think about the rain, about how clouds are nothing and yet they block the sun, about how evaporation is invisible - or just don't think at all. Just don't talk at all. Just let revelation hit. Just sit. And to not even be tempted to consider having a roof over your head, because the importance of that has been dissolved with everything else.
Peace. That's that place to me.
I don't tell anyone that there are songs in my head that I cannot write down. There are images I cannot draw. There are experiences I can't explain, dreams and nightmares that aren't ascribed words when they're given.
But they're there.
They're inside of me and they affect me and I cannot get them out.
They are parts of me that people will know without knowing it, because they will never be named, they will never exit, but will remain internal and will therefore contribute to the external.
What is this place we go to when our hearts break? What is this vulnerability, this insecurity, this exhaustion and tension?
Heartbreaks don't just lie where other's have handled it irresponsibly. They come when I am irresponsible myself. They come when I ask for them to come, when I ask for something new to break my heart, for some injustice to be brought to my attention, for there to be a fire lit. Because I don't like mundane. I don't like mediocrity. I don't like monotony. I'm not satisfied or happy if there is nothing to chase after. If there is nothing to fight.
I say this - often, I feel.
What makes hearts break?
In good ways, in bad ways, in all ways?
Is there survivors guilt to someone once suicidal, a guilt that nags the question, 'Why did I find hope? Why couldn't all the others?'
Does scar tissue move in to places once soft, when something good is abruptly left behind through rash decisions and sudden emotional distance?
When what is good, but not good enough is decidedly ended, what keeps the decision firm and the motive clear and the heart protected?
Is letting the bird out of the cage and feeling the loneliness, the pain in the now silence where the song once vibrated, pivotal to whether or not it will return?
When is it okay to love? To let someone in?
I don't know.
I guess I'd like to. Or maybe more so, I'd like for you to. And for you to tell me.
For you to change my mind about some things.
I guess I just don't know why hearts break, and why when other's are broken, I have a sympathy-break.
I guess I don't know why when my heart shatters, I isolate myself.
And I don't mean heartbroken-over-he-once-loved-me-and-now-loves-someone-else, although sure, we can include that, but I mean everything. I mean when someone gets sick. I mean when someone hears bad news. I mean when someone makes a snide remark or has a sharp tone of voice. I mean when you find out about some injustice. I mean when something important was forgotten. I mean when you get a revelation about something absurd. I mean all these things.
I usually stop and make myself talk with You. Sometimes I don't and I go to others first. I just don't know where the line is, for man was not meant to be alone.
"Why do you keep asking where the lines are drawn? Who said there were lines?"
... I've been providing the wrong questions.
And the card houses fall.
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"In an instant of time - while your friend hesitates for a word - what things pass through your mind? We have never told the whole truth. We may confess ugly facts - the meanest cowardice or the shabbiest and most prosaic impurity - but the tone is false. The very act of confessing - an infinitesimally hypocritical glance - a dash of humour - all this contrives to dissociate the facts from your very self.
No one Could guess how familiar and, in a sense, congenial to your soul these things were, how much of a piece with all the rest: down there, in the dreaming inner warmth, they struck no such discordant note, were not nearly so odd and detachable from the rest of you, as they seem when they are turned into words. We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are exceptional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our virtues - like the bad tennis player who calls his normal form his 'bad days' and mistakes his rare successes for his normal. I do not think it is our fault that we cannot tell the real truth about ourselves; the persistent, life-long, inner murmur of spite, jealousy, prurience, greed and self-complacence, simply will not go into words. But the important thing is that we should not mistake our inevitably limited utterances for a full account of the worst that is inside."
-Clive Staples Lewis, The Problem of Pain
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"You can't control what breaks, but you can control the kind of person you're becoming. Hard hearts that transform into hearts that beat for the things that God's heart beats for. We control our response."
-Rob Bell
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