Life is a series of stops and starts.

You find someone to love, and it starts. All of the sappy love songs are sung for you. Parts of your body, the bits of canvas skin that you always thought were innert, suddenly come to life. And your chest gets an ache when you think of the sweet consideration of the other person, that gentle tidal giving that you feel from the sweet essence of just being around them.

Life stops when love stops. The sad love songs, the ones that have you wrapped up in fetal position on the floor, the kind of music you never thought you would listen to, spells out the story of your loss in ways you could never articulate in your own words. A small routine, a small detail-going to the shops, walking past that tree, seeing a special on TV that would have interested your lost love-they all hurt with the poisoned feeling that comes with grief. And your heart climbs up into your ribcage, as far as it can go, in order to just find a cave in which to recover and feel protected.

But life doesn't stop, really. You've just hit the pause button. The tape is still playing. The sun still rises, the dishes still need doing, and the newspaper still gets delivered. Even though your heart has hit a wall at 60 kmh, the rest of you still has to move with the inertia of the living.

There are some people who make us stop inside, and never really start back up the right way again. It's as though, upon hitting the wall, the fender got bent and impedes the future progress of the tires. The car veers to the left a bit. The headlight on the front is permanently cracked. If you look around you, you can see these half-jalopies walking around, and in truth, it takes one to know one. They walk around with visible bandages on their pride, and a scent of lost wafting around the hollow of their throats.

I am one of the army, yet another imposter of the living. I had my heart broken into such tiny pieces that they all jingled together, making chiming sounds as I walked. I used a lot of tape and glue, but I was able to pass myself off as an acceptable decoy. I even fell in love again, and I found-as one does-that finding a new love healed a lot of the cracks of the old love. But, unfortunately, not all of them. And as I look forward and wonder if I am headed for another wall impact at 60 kmh, if I can get put back together again. Or even to wonder if I want to survive this car wreck, maybe being in shards will be safer.

Whoever said "'Tis better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all" should be strapped to the front of a car and forced to feel the impact of how it feels to have lost.

Or, at the very least, to see how it feels inside of someone whose life is on pause.

-H
everydaystranger@hotmail.com

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 11:01 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 539 words, total size 3 kb.