Something Stupid

 On a long run recently, I caught myself thinking “You deserve everything you got and more.”

In the sense of punishment. 

But thankfully my brain immediately countered with “And what if we thought of this in the positive sense? You deserve all the wonderful things that have happened to you, and more?”

We often think of heartbreak as something that happens to us. Someone breaks our heart.

But here, I’m the heartbreaker. And yet I’m heartbroken. 

My heart became broken and fractured slowly. It became fragile more than it was crushed or shattered. A thousand little “no’s,” a thousand rejected bids for affection or attention. Cries for help deemed as misplaced. An unwillingness to engage or change - or perhaps more simply and kindly, the inability to.

I am heartbroken because it is a sad and terrible thing to see love slowly die. Unnourished and uncared for: because I know that if things had been different in a thousand little ways, in a thousand little occasions, perhaps we could have gone on. 

Should we have gone on? That I don’t know. Certainly not in the current constellation. Had a thousand little things been different? But they weren’t, and they aren’t. 

The things that keep coming up for me at the moment are “unravelling.” New things and situations and people are always tying us up, and we have to unravel the effects these things have on us to reveal ourselves again. 

Over and over again, because there’s always a new effect, a new tying up, a new tendency to close off and cut off parts of ourselves. The unravelling is never finished, because every thread is tied into another. 

There are other thoughts given to my by others that keep returning to me the past days:

“If there is a god, you should thank him.” And 

“The next one will be better.” 

And the biggest meditation on my heart apart from “unravelling” right now is still “I am every small tenderness I have handed out. Even if it didn’t come back. Especially then.”

I am giving myself grace to know I tried and I can’t live a life unawake or unconscious, and I can’t just let life happen to me. The thing I am best at is keeping going so I will and I must. 

Because I’ve got shit to do tomorrow.