“There is a buried metaphorical pun in the Japanese thought all Buddhist teachings are rooted in: all being awake is saying goodbye. Or, to put it another way, every time we say goodbye, we awake to the nature of things.” Robert Hass.
“What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we know them…And they have changed since then…At every minute, every meeting, we are meeting a stranger…” T.S. Eliot.
Last year, I felt something break in me on this day because someone I knew had become a stranger. Just like that and it didn’t make sense. Three days later, I found out that what broke was my heart--- when I thought that I no longer had it.
I finally wept that night, wept the whole night, wept for all the things I had stopped myself from weeping over, wept once more for a long time. That night, I felt my heart beat and break with each beat and bleed with each break. I couldn’t breathe.
“I am dying!” I had almost screamed.
My sister had said, “It’s a good thing that you finally feel.” What she didn’t say was that until that night I couldn’t feel. She had her palm on my heart and I felt it beating, breaking, bleeding. I felt it.
I had thought: I don’t want it! And that’s when I began vomiting. For months, I vomited every time my heart felt something piercing--- diminutives, comparatives, and superlatives of all emotions. I didn’t know what to do with a heart. And those who love me didn’t know what to do with me.
I had simply said to dispel their worry, “My nerves are just shot. It’s adjustment to change—not working or studying. It’s recovery--- from exhaustion. It’s purging of everything that I had become for the past three years that I am not. I need to let it out.”
I knew that I was trying to vomit my heart out.
Dear Mother, Dear Branch Of The Mother Tree,
that was what made me who I am--- a being knowing that I had no heart. Without a heart, I could breathe without wanting to die; I was able to understand the why of everything. Without a heart, nothing was beyond me and I always knew what was supposed to be known and did what was supposed to be done. Without a heart, I was safe from pain, protected from pain that preyed on me.
Without a heart, I was able to go inside me and see my self, dissect my self.
Without a heart, I was able to piece together all that had broken in me.
Without a heart, I knew that I had been returned from death and did not return quiet right. One knows--- feels--- when the pieces of your Self don’t fit because there is something missing.
Without a heart
But like in any card game, I dealt with what was dealt to me. I made do. And to win, I, of course, would cheat. Cheating is a matter of reading everything--- bodies, hearts, minds, lives, souls— all tells, all buttons. Press here and this is what happens. Press there and that is what happens. And cards became chess pieces--- each piece had a purpose. People are cards thrown away or a chess pieces taken out of the board.
Was I playing God?
No, I was just being myself.
After all, I was playing to win and that was to win my life.
I lose, I die.
But even without a heart, I still loved.
It’s all in the mind.
You can see it, you know.
On your hand.
The forefinger is the mind.
The ring finger is the heart.
Which is longer?
The longer one rules you.
That changes too, every seven years.
That night a year ago, my heart had finally returned to me after seven years. Do you know how that feels--- to have your heart returned to you, to fee your heart fill the hole in your chest, and to feel that it’s broken again? I felt, everything all at once, finally alive and wanting to die once more, knowing that I couldn’t.
Living with a heart, everything was a joy and everything was painful. When my heart had returned to me, I found myself crying all the time, crying for what fills me, what empties me.
When I was bargaining with God while I was almost dead years ago, I had said, “In exchange for life…I will live without feeling anything. In exchange for my life, You have to die.” Then there were no more bargains.
To survive and not want to die, I had to have no heart. After all, it had been broken by life, so many times, and it had become this cancerous lump in my chest--- poisoning me, killing me. I could no longer trust what it was saying to me when all it did was betray me--- leading me to pain and suffering, one unrelenting wave after another.
Do this one time: wade into the sea at night when there’s a storm.
Wade until the water reaches your chest, just above the heart. Stand there. Feel the waves push you, pound you, suck you, swallow you. Choke on water, choke out water, gasp for breath, feel your chest sting and almost cave in from the pounding. You just stand there and see if the waves will finally bury you. You just stand there and strain from the waves pulling you, from taking you out into the dark, hungry depths.
Of course I have done this: That’s how having a heart felt
And I could not reason with my heart. I could not reason with my heart to come out of the water. I could not trust what betrays.
I had said to myself, “The heart stops now.”
“Let’s just trust my mind,” I said as I got out of the water.
The problem was--- how do I trust my mind if my mind had been broken too? So I journeyed into Reason, into Sanity, finding and filling all the holes in the Real precisely because I was coming from the reality of Insanity, from the Unreal, from the All Too Real.
All too real---do you now how it feels to wake up not knowing what day it is, where you are, or where you’re standing because you live all too real?
Once I woke up years ago in our van and I had asked, “Where’s Ate?”
Dad had been alarmed but had masked it, “They left the other day.”
“The other day?”
He said, “Yes. We just came from the beach today. You kept on diving into the sea. Remember?”
Then remembering became an exercise, tracing back until I return to where I am and when I am--- the here, the now--- to see tomorrow.
I see it as waking up and I’m standing somewhere, knowing there is a line dividing everything into two. I didn’t know from which side of the line I was standing on: Real or Unreal? Sanity or Madness? There had to be constants that I look to, my signposts that say “This is real” and “That is madness” and “Here is where you stand”.
And you cannot simply become a stranger to me because then a constant becomes a variable. The signposts would no longer make sense and I will be lost.
This is why I always make the effort to see and touch and listen to people in my world. So that we can be witnesses to the changes in each other. So that we don’t become strangers. We are constants in this way.
That is why I am vigilant about keeping watch on all the variables in my world. Variables can be strangers that disturb this tenuous balance that is my life and everyday is a matter of life and death.
This tenuous balance is a ticking bomb and it is not just my life but all the lives intertwined in mine that may implode from a variable. We are constants in this vigil.
It is not a matter of controlling constants and variables. It is a matter of knowing how the constants are and how the variables would change the path of the constants, me.
I prevent what I know could easily destroy what I have been trying to protect and win:
Life.
Everyday.
Everyday:
I know about goodbyes.
I know about awakenings.
I know about meeting strangers.
I know about saying, “You are not who you are.”
I know about saying, “There you are.”
I know about saying, “Well, that’s that.”
But having a heart means I remember them before the goodbyes and awakenings to strangers. I remember what was lost---in my life--- and that what I awaken to I cannot have in my life. I understand that people change but when they change to people I don’t know, they cease to exist.
They are strangers.
After all, if we regard each other we will never be strangers to each other--- we are who we are even when we change. And when we see the changes, we don’t meet strangers. We see changes but not a stranger. This is why, you and I, no matter what space and time had separated us, separates us, you will always feel like it was just yesterday that you were with me. Or that everyday I am with you and you are with me.
You see me and you know me. I see you and I know you. It would feel as if we have always known each other. Constants. That is why you and I can talk about how we live and what keeps us alive.
And we just don’t see changes: what we see is becoming and returning to one’s self.
And now that I have a heart I feel this sadness:
About goodbyes.
About awakenings.
About meeting strangers.
I knew that it would come to this. I had tried and hoped that it wouldn’t be, so that I wouldn’t have to feel this sadness. I try to prevent. That is who I am--- I cannot simply accept the nature of things. I am driven to change the nature of things--- so that I don’t feel this sadness, so that I would never have to say “I’m sorry” or hear “I’m sorry”.
After all, we choose what we do and what is done is done. There is no changing that and it’s futile to apologize for a thing you chose to do. There should be no regret, no “sorry”, no feeling of futility.
I do not choose people to intertwine in my life lightly.
Such is the nature of things. And it makes me sad-- because I saw not who they were to me or who they should have been; I saw who they are to me--- strangers.
I cease seeing you. And that is your doing, not mine. We live the consequences.
I do not choose deeds to intertwine in my life lightly.
It makes me sad--- this nature of things. It makes me sad to say goodbye once more on this day, just like this day a year ago. Such is the nature of things.
This sadness almost bends me, making me cry and cry out, renders me wordless. This sadness had once broken me and had made me reach for:
knives slicing my pulse,
pills putting me on comatose,
ropes from which I can hang,
bodies of water where I can drown,
ledges and stairs from where I can fall,
cars on the road,
guns pointed to my head.
Such is the nature of things--- such violence--- and I am fighting it, playing to win from it a life of peace. The constants in my life are all fighting it, so that no one and nothing would make me feel that much sadness again.
So that I would not be lost.
Most of the time I am alone in fighting it--- such is the nature of things.
All too real, isn’t it? These things happen to people all the time and we laugh at these people. I am capable of laughing about it too, when it is necessary to laugh about horrible things. After all, one has to know how to laugh at one’s self.
That too is the nature of things.
And this sad nature of things had first made me reach for a charcoal pencil and a blank page to just draw the lines, edges, and curves of this sadness---
---But I stop.
I wish I didn’t feel this sadness because my heart feels that it’s unnecessary--- unnecessary because I did not choose to feel this but I am feeling it anyway.
It hurts my heart to beat “Who – are – you --? What—have—you—done—to—yourself--?”
It hurts my heart to beat “No more… No more…”
It wounds my heart to beat “I,stop,loving,you,” when I don’t want to but it is necessary.
It wounds my heart when I will it to “Stop. Now.” when it doesn’t need to but it is necessary.
It is necessary so that I live.
Such is the nature of things in my life: I am who I am and sometimes, times like these I stop my heart from beating_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________Because I know that it is necessary, especially in this struggle in writing.
It is necessary to be without a heart just when it has been returned to me to able to put this and things like these into words.
To not let it all come out in breath.
To pause.
To not let it all come out in one breath in one text.
To pause.
To not let it all come out in one breath in one text so that it doesn’t drown you.
To pause.
To not let it all come out in one breath in one text so that it doesn’t drown you as I struggle to breathe evenly.
To pause.
To not let it all come out in one breath in one text so that it doesn’t drown you as I struggle to breathe evenly so that I too don’t drown.
To pause.
To write it.
To pause.
So that it doesn’t come out a howl---
To pause
---of grieving gibberish.
To pause.
To move.
To live.
To move on.
To move on to writing---
I put my heart on pause--
And it stops.
It wounds my soul when I stop my heart from beating to be able to write.
It heals my soul when I keep my heart beating to be able to write.
That is living.
That is the struggle.
Now, here, do you feel that you’re meeting a stranger?
Exactly.
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