ink, sweat + cityscapes

“Teach me that I am finite. Carve it into my soul so I remember it—into my heart every time it breaks. Beat it into my feet every time they cramp up when I’m running beaches, into every vertebra of my spine so that i know it every time I stand on tiptoe and stretch up to hug a friend. 

Why do people only pay respects to the dead? We, so full of life, so ready for adventure, our every blood vessel and nerve and tendon vibrant and awake, love and live and cry and laugh apart. But should my hearts splutter, falter, or stop.. you’ll be at my side. I am no better than you! As long as your heartbeat stays constant, I take it for granted. But if it stops, no other sound—no other heartbeat—nothing else will take away the loss.

Sometimes I don’t sleep. And at 3AM, nothing much can be done to ease the panic. By then I have texted and read and wandered and written and daydreamed and stretched enough—too much. So I lie in my bed, feeling every square inch of the ominous depth of its emptiness, of my awakeness, of my aloneness. And I listen to my heartbeat. I feel it in my chest and, seconds later, in the bruise on my foot, in the headache behind my eyes, in my clenching and unclenching fists.

I lie awake and listen to my heartbeat.

Somehow, my scarred insecure judgmental 11-year-old self got scarred and calloused. Driving home yesterday, a friend’s abandonment hurt me so much that my little rhythmic heart gave up, almost. But I breathed in and out, watching the blur of lights and cars and buildings and yellow lines. 

But every night, sometime between listening to my heartbeat and waking up slow the next morning, the depth of my inept humanity meets the passionate mercy of Christ’s blood. But nothing heals. Every wound in me callouses and closes. I feel the stiffness. I know it’s pride. I know that there are truths waiting for permission to sink in. I know there’s more to this. I know that a response is expected of me.

My heart doesn’t know how.”