My heart is cracking today. These quick fixes aren’t working. So many hairline fractures in that beating, bloody ceramic. Tape won’t do, it comes unstuck. Glue and epoxy burn. I tried wrapping a ribbon around it and tying a bow, but it didn’t cheer me up, it just came unraveled. If I could fix it from the inside out that might work, but how can one do that without taking oneself completely apart? I don’t have time for this. The world doesn’t stop and neither can I. I’m far down on the transplant list, and who could blame them? I should have never taken my heart out of the box. It stays much safer in the tissue and Styrofoam. I was stubborn. I could handle it. I could handle having a heart. I would treat it right and sing it lovely songs and make it flutter. Of all people I should have realized that too many things are out of your hands to have a responsibility like a heart. And if its replaced? Well what then?

Will I ever be the same?

Will I get used to the change?

Will it make me lethargic and dull my flame?

“Everything gets better eventually, J.P.”
“No it doesn’t.” I mumble. Some people end up taking a nap on a bench, nowhere to sleep, and never look back from  those streets. Some will even die on that very same bench.  What of them? Did it get better for them?

How about a tragic story of a boy born sick? The first time he opened his eyes he saw sixty five roses dancing above him, they took his breath away. And he never quite got it back. Short breaths for half a life-time. The pain of things being temporally askew. “Never, ever worry about something you can’t control, J.P.” Pain isn’t always worry. Sometimes it comes with the knowledge of what will never be.

I tried to sing songs to my heart but my voice carries the blues better than anything else. Maybe the harmonica caused a crack or two, maybe that dent is from a guitar case. I should have stuck with the harp; such lulling, naive sounds. The kind my heart might have liked. I tried warning it with my songs to expect the worst because the worst almost always happens eventually. The only thing it ever said back to me: “A heart cannot prepare, it can only live and experience.” But I didn’t understand until it was falling apar.

I don’t know how to fix a heart, and I don’t know how to prevent the breaks. My blood will soon start leaking into my soul, it will feel so cold to feel so warm inside. It will never make me numb, though. I tried numbing it from the beginning. It works for a while, and then your heart becomes too heavy to support itself. It fills with sadness and inevitability. These things are heavier than gold. Happiness and laughter are lighter than air, they make your heart float. As it turns out, forced indifference isn’t the same as happiness. It sinks like a stone but only when you forget that you’re not supposed to be sad.

I forgot too often. I sang the wrong songs. I took it out of the box. I tried covering up the cracks until there were too many to seal.

Paint was my favorite for covering the cracks. I could feel them still, with every shallow beat, but as long as no one saw them, as long as everyone thought I played harp, I could ignore it sometimes and keep others from pitying the circumstances surrounding my tattered organ.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger- unless there’s cracks in your heart or fungus in your lungs. Then its just waiting for your body to fall apart.

A shell. A carcass. Gore that once held the most brilliant of circuitry. The most magnificent of pathways hurrying those beautiful thoughts along. Why do our bodies stay here to rot while our minds leave everyone behind?

Because we don’t take care of our hearts. Why would a mind want to stay around without a heart?