Hearts aren’t always easy.  In fact, in my experience, the more the heart reveals itself, the more its contradictions grasp some tiny foothold of disagreement or reproach to hide behind.  How could it be otherwise?  If there were nothing real there, we would need no defenses.  If our safety was purely a matter of our own perception, we would all be angels – or demons.

I stake out the curmudgeon’s voice so often, and this is why.  Clinging to the futile hope that you can hide your heart only makes you human, and human is alright with me.  If it were so easy to unveil and mend our mistaken unhappiness, what would be the point of trust?

he said she said i loveyou
but they meant different things
she said he said i loveyou
but that is just one side of the story
they said i loveyou you and me
forever and today
what lost their hearts i plainly show
where found their hearts i only know
now beating inside me.

My heart is full of silky-smooth pins and old fabric the color of candy.  That’s all I am saying.

No, you never met her.  But everyday she took some little piece of this world and moved it forward.  Dried Tuesday’s coffee cups with Friday’s towel.  Carried a geranium stalk home in her pocket, and watched its roots fill the jelly jar of water on her window sill.   Sewed when she had to, and very often prayed. All with you in mind.

No, you never knew her.

Her smile is a note in your pocket –
a thought you carry and soothe between your fingers
until you’d think the words would be erased.
But they only grow more vivid
as the ink fades
you have absorbed them.
What do they say?
You know now
what all words say.
This hurts.
I love you.
Come home.

(Today – being conveniently both Monday and February 1st – is the start of 14 Hearts in 14 Days, 2016.  For 2 blog weeks – which is 10 human business days – I will share images of 14 hearts in honor of all my valentines, you know who you are.  The rules are entirely in my favor – I don’t have to post 14 images, although I do try – only 14 total hearts in the images.  This year, we can’t worry too much about how the valentines get made.  Let’s just put a heart on it, and keep going.)

Oh yes, I forgot to mention – I am moving again.  Vintage books, china ballerinas, fabric backgrounds all lie dormant in boxes – little sleeping beauties wrapped in plastic bubbles.  For a while, nothing will feel like home.

Now, I don’t care for moving.  It takes me so long to settle anywhere.  That’s the issue, right there: I need to see my half-dreamed ideas arranged along shelves and hung on walls to feel that I, too, am present.  Without the murmur of those things I love, the silence is too solid and uncomfortable.

I have certain friends – and they know who they are – who can pack their lives up in less than 2 weeks.  I wish I could be half so self-possessed.  I really mean it.  But, the softest center of myself only peeks out from the safety of her glass bonsai forest.  If I want to see her, then she requires plastic flowers and vases shaped like slender, giving hands.   Maybe I could celebrate these tender enticements, and schlep them with gratitude –  instead of constantly wondering why I need all this stuff.

Because, I guess I know why.

My writing arm is rusty – I can’t blame it entirely on school.  Sometimes a silence just descends, blurring the inklings that might become words, into a soft fog that slips through my fingers the more I reach toward it.

This isn’t meant to sound sad.  I have loved fog since its thickening magic turned streetlights into moons outside the window of my childhood home near the Lake in Chicago, and enticed my imagination into the disappearing treetops of the park.  Snow and rain leave their mark – but fog casts its doubts on the solidity of the world and then withdraws its spell without a trace.

But I can tell you this – since I know you worry.  Work was good today, and the sun was still out when I left. I went to my first class, and I liked it.  I had a good dinner – porketta and salad.  And I thought, so much, of you.

Remember how you used to spin yourself dizzy, just to watch the lamps and couch and pictures on the wall keep swimming past when you stood still?

The adult equivalent – which (judging from my disorientation) I have inadvertently discovered – is significantly less fun.  Now that the room has stopped spinning, I find – dervish-like – that the world is different because I have changed.  I wrote more, slept less and concentrated under pressure to a degree I didn’t know I could.  I make no apologies for how I have whimpered and licked my wounds in the process. The hardest obstacles to navigate remain inside myself.

The intensity of these past few months has been, in a way, the greatest medicine of all. It made my options clear,  at least in the moment – sit down and write, get up and start packing, you stink – take a shower.  If my purpose was no grander than not to fail, that was good enough. Simply making it to the end is a victory.

But, starting next week, I’m gonna get back on that ride, and go again.  My purpose is ever-so slightly clearer, and I know something I didn’t know before:  there is no turning back.  Everything, good or bad, is in front of me.  Truckers, you are not down yet.

It is impossible to overstate how very scared I am.  About my prospects for future employment and the financial scarcity that entails.  About losing my illusions that someday I would have adult life figured out, with a little house to call my own.  Someday has arrived, and I am pretty sure I missed my turn-off for Futureville. But faith, it seems, has a lesson for me.

In the past when I have considered faith, it has seemed like a demented, cheerful bully, shoving its wild, grimaced clench of a smile into the fragile core of my uncertainty.  I think I see faith that way because that is, in fact, what a lot of people call the wall of blindness through which no real doubt can ever penetrate.

Now I am feeling faith is something else – a tender, skinless thing quivering alongside me with every jolt of fear.  This faith has no answers besides its presence.  It promises me nothing – nothing different, nothing new, and certainly not safety.  And yet as it hunkers beside me – not waiting out the storm but knee high in the sh*t – it whispers simply that everything is changing.  That I do not know everything.  That where there is darkness, there may also be light.

This picture was taken a few years ago, in a diner I had retreated to for lunch after a particularly morose morning steaming and ironing clothes for a client.  I saw my circumstances as pretty tough, at the time.  I knew I was depressed, working with people who really didn’t like me, crying at almost every thought that crossed my mind.  Some days, I grasped for relief by hiding in the back stairwell, and trying the mindfulness exercises I was practicing at home.  On this bright late winter day, though, I just had to get the hell out of there.  Any stool at any diner counter feels like home to me, that’s how deeply that posture ingrained itself in my Chicago-girl bones.

I was wondering why I chose this picture today.  I have newer ones I could post – more soulful, mysterious images (though it is hard to improve on the visual pun of clocks and chickens coming home to roost).  Regrets are on my mind lately – possibly the greatest waster of time there is.  I keep imagining the decisions I should have made around the time I took this picture, hiding out in Mineral Point, Wisconsin.  Things are certainly as tough now as they were then.  I had forgotten, though, how much every single day hurt back then.  And how much I lived in my overwhelming need to know what I had done wrong.

Since the day I ate a mediocre burger surrounded by an infintely repeating brood of Barred Rock hens, I have made even more mistakes.  In fact, I have misjudged almost every important financial and professional decision I could have.  But the harder part for me, by far, is to remain open to the memories of pleasure and  beauty that have travelled with me since that time.  A journey which, thanks to this photo, I can measure by the minute.

I’m working on it.