HEART STRONG
A FANTASY AND A PRAYER
Do you believe in love?
Like the big kind.
The dreamiest kind.
The too-good-to-be-true-I-saw-it-in-a-movie kind.
I did. I used to.
I believed in that kind of love.
I was a hopeless romantic. The most hopeless.
But I’ve converted in my age… I’m no longer a hopeless romantic.
I am a hope-full romantic.
The hope-iest there ever was or will be.
Because every time I broke, I rebuilt - dreamier than before.
That’s what it is to be HEART STRONG.
To be HEART STRONG is to manifest a life that straddles your wildest dreams and your must humble prayer.
So this is mine…
HEART STRONG: A FANTASY AND A PRAYER
The heart is a muscle, you know?
If that’s true, mine is very strong.
Built by heartbreak.
Built by bench pressing other bleeding hearts whose intentions were less than well.
Built by deadlifting through their discard…
Barely beating, I plucked weaponized words from its sinews. Words that had precariously nuzzled in like foxtail weeds strewn through a pair of delicate tights. Every fragile excavation, a threat to the whole.
But I waded (and waited) through each thorn.
I made it work again, my heart.
That weakened muscle.
Beat by beat, I willed it to life. Because they say “home is where the heart is” and I really needed a home.
So it survived.
Sinewy but strong.
Last night I took it in whatever condition it would come in, and I closed my eyes and I called you in…
Whoever you are, wherever you are!
And then, you entered. Straight through my heart.
I started to weep in a way that might be joy if it wasn’t so overwhelming.
I wept because your sudden presence ripped through the very center of it, through every rusted seam I’d cobbled through to sow you here.
And as I weep, you take my face in your hands and you say “I love you” and you say it like its the most obvious thing anyone has ever said.
It makes me weep again.
And I imagine how this heart leak will carry on for our years to come, these happy tears melting every hardened part of me that’s survived the cruel that came before.
And then, all that preliminary pain so suddenly false.
Because all your love and all that you are, so inconceivably true:
That Holy Spark of Recognition that was the birth right of our love.
That smile, so kind.
Our mutual absurdity glistening from eye to eye.
My Fool recognizing yours…
And how often I’ll keel over in the kind of laughter that would make you pray for a thousand deaths just to hold one more of our sacred chuckles.
The kind of laughter that will leave me wrung out on our future family floor, lamenting all the laughs we must’ve missed along the way to now.
“Where were you?” I’ll cry out.
Maybe then my tears will cleanse you from all the wrong turns you took on your way to find me.
Maybe you, too, were lost in this same town, all these years.
Maybe you were looking for a good woman and all you could find were broken girls.
I was One of them after all.
Until I broke so bad that I finally learned how to nurse her back to life.
Forgave her.
Apologized to her.
I let her weep the way you now let me weep.
And just like you, I held her beat up heart and I said, “Don’t worry. I’ll stay.”
It was ten minutes and ten lifetimes…
That’s what they say, you know? “Just ten minutes a day of imagining something to make it real.”
They say we have to create first from the inside out.
That I have to see it in my mind’s eye…
Feel you as if you were already here. Believe it, to see it.
And just when you became as real as you could be, you turned to fully face me and then I saw her, our little future, our baby Heart, cuddled in your arms.
Heart…
Of course her name is Heart…
It took so much of it to get her here.
Aga to jest piękne!!!!!
🙏🏼❤️