When You Hurt

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart

At least six months. That’s how long they say it takes to adjust to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Not to be happy, mind you, but to adjust. To losing a parent for the first time, losing the last parent you had left. To watching cancer take a tiny body you loved with every breath.

To someone you loved once walking out the door. Leaving. Door clicks shut. Gone.

Stand watching the door closing slowly. Corner of your eye, a hand on the doorknob. Can’t look, can’t connect eyes, can’t do anything but stand there. Remembering hugs at the door. Waving in the driveway. Eyes darting over at the last second. To connect. Then watch the door. Click. Shut.

Sink to the floor softly and cry bitter tears no one hears. Not crying for what was, but for what wasn’t and for what was never going to be and for how long you couldn’t see it. But maybe most of all, cry for the day you finally did see.

A midsummer night’s dream. Cupid painted blind.

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I don’t think six months, I think twenty four books. Sounds like a thing I can do. Books are more than paper and ink, words and stories. They are fires for the cold, ropes thrown to the drowning, bread to the starving.

A person who loves books can get through almost anything with a book in their hands. Curl in a corner, open the pages. Drink like a man in the desert found water. Hard to quench a thirst been there so long all a body knows anymore is thirst. Not just thirsty but made of thirst. Drink more I tell myself and then I do.

One rule stands firm. No romance. Historical fiction, dystopia, fantasy.

Okay, two. No little houses on the prairie filled with goodnight John Boy and happy endings for shining people. I am no shining person. Let there be dragons. I am a time traveler, don’t know what year it is, jumping from Kafka to King, Hemingway to Hobb, Poe to Pullman to Plath.

Read about Sylvia Plath, whispering about life branching out like a fig tree. On every branch a fat purple fig, a wonderful life beckoning and winking. Professor, editor, poet. Europe, Africa and South America. Frozen with indecision, can’t choose. I think of her final choice, leaning into that oven, towels shoved in the cracks of the door to protect the sleeping babies and I weep. For her, for me, for all of us.

Laugh and cry over the mad women’s ball. Bunch of crazy women locked up, locked away back when that’s what men did with inconvenient women. Pulling hair, weeping, begging to go home and in between the mania and shaking panic, planning a party and on that party day, I dance with them.

Read about a blue skinned Appalachian librarian lived her days ostracized, shunned, head down, accepting judgement only to learn she has a medical condition. Doctor gives her a bottle of tiny pills, cures her and she can barely look at her face. Doesn’t know who that white faced woman in the mirror is. Can’t bear that stranger’s face, stops taking the pills. Turns blue again. Comfortable being shunned.

Toni Morrison completely undoes me in Beloved. Which I never was.

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There’s a river five minutes from my house. Walk far enough, you come to a caution sign. Tell you the currents are strong, can pull you under. Seems to me the internet should have a sign like that. Give a robot one sniff of pain, it brings high tide. Waves of pain until you’re drowning in it.

Here’s what some man said. He wishes his wife would put out more. Said oh, he knows why. She tells him all the time. Doesn’t feel valued. Asks him please help more. Do dishes. Push the vacuum. They both work. She’s tired. All the time. Says he knows he could, doesn’t know why he doesn’t. But still. A man can wish and he does. Wishes she’d put out more. Is his wish.

Here’s what mama used to say when she was alive to dispense motherly advice. God helps those that help themselves. Don’t know why I remember that but I think to myself you, sir? You ain’t. Helping yourself. Not with words like that. Want to give his head a shake for him.

Seems to me touch is the most precious communication. Man’s hand on his wife’s back. Her hand on his shoulder. Fingers wound together. Fingertips brushing hair back from a brow. Cheek on a chest, head on a lap.

When touch gets lost in the woods, can’t find its way home, all we have left is words. And those are the ones you chose? Find the ugliest ones you can, hurl them like daggers? Wonder how long before his door clicks shut too.

Don’t know why I am reading this. Think about commenting but click shut the story, click shut the browser, go crawl into another book. So thirsty. Go drink more.

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How many pages does it take to end a marriage? Heal a heart. Cut a whole in half. Rebuild a life. How many pages to stop remembering your mama gasping her last breath in the doctor’s arms or the look on your father’s face last time you saw him alive before he crumpled to the floor, gone.

How many pages to stop remembering secrets whispered soft on pillows in the dark of night, or reaching into a casket to hold a cold waxen hand. How many pages to stop remembering your body wrapped weeping around a tiny ball of fur?

How many pages to stop whispering f — k cancer, f — k cancer, over and over.

How many pages to stop wondering where love went, what killed it?

There are not enough pages for that, I think but I am Walt Whitman and these are the days that must happen. I am Poe, living a dream within a dream. Like Sylvia Plath I can never read all the books I want, be all the people I want, live all the lives I want. Sitting in a bell jar, surrounded by figs and lovers with strange names.

I am Wordsworth, wandering lonely as a cloud. Over hill and dale, continuous as the stars that shine and twinkle in the Milky Way. Watch daffodils sway in the breeze.

Lungs inflating with the onrush of scenery.

Pencil in hand, filling my paper with the breathings of my heart. And slowly, it dawns on me. This is maybe what it means. To be happy.

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”
― William Wordsworth