Everyone knows that stories must be told from a place of understanding. We live life looking forward and we understand it only when we look back. Well, I don’t understand any of it. I have enough experience in areas like tragedy and grief to write a collection as a wise teacher. But I would only be kidding myself and misleading the masses.
Here’s the one thing I’ve learned; No one knows anything. And at the top of the list of ignorance we find the ones who are too prideful to realize their own folly.
When I was seventeen years old I crossed over pass the veil between this world and the one beyond. I’d guess that place was what we call Heaven. Ironically when I came back into my body after a long detour and restful sleep from a coma, I was led directly to the two places we humans seek out for wisdom; a church and therapy. In that state of sleepwalking back into a fallen world the spirit within me strongly rebuked them both. It’s an interesting phenomenon to visit the true place of all wisdom and then be handed a comparison so extreme.
Our religions have little to do with knowing what God is like and our experts who wear name badges and white coats on the other side of learning from books what humans before them learned from books and passed down are of the most hypocritical lost ones in the bunch. It’s one thing to know that you don’t know and a complete different scale of madness to believe you know and wrongly mislead others in your example.
Well, that’s not the subject I intended to write about tonight. I guess this is what happens when you don’t have a plan and just let the words flow however they need to be released.
I created a heart shape box last night from cardboard, ducktape and clay. Then I painted it and went over the case with epoxy hoping to conceal all of the cracking that occurred when I left the pottery to itselt overnight. It didn’t work out like I’d planned. Yet, as I was about to throw my day of work in the trashcan I took another look and saw something meaningful. I realized the broken mess of a heart might not be worthy of a wealthy man’s walls but in a way the piece was absolutely perfect. I studied it with wondering eyes as I saw a piece of my own essence staring back at me. This wasn’t just a heart made of cardboard and clay, this was a parable of my own existence.
There I sat feeling hollow and hopeless – chasing distractions to keep myself from dying in the dehydration of unstoppable streams of tears. And what of it? What do you do with a woman in such a pitiful state she can’t even get a grip and pull herself together? Well, first you try to hide her imperfections by covering her up with layers of paint. Don’t I do that everyday when I get ready for work and apply make-up and fake eyelashes? Of course I do. And when that doesn’t work and the broken pieces still shine through then you attempt to cover the heart with epoxy. Frame it and pretend its scars are intentional – the very essence of what gives the piece its character.
To be honest the piece looked half decent after the epoxy hardened. Character it certainly embraced and the installation of lights underneath the surface gave it a lifelike appeal. It was as a living stone, I thought to myself. My duaghter walked outside on the patio and gave the piece a good look up and down. “I like it. Very neat.” She nodded her head as she kept the rest of her remarks inside. It wasn’t until later did I realize that I didn’t share with her the very reason the heart went through such transformations in the first place. It was a box. Hollow. Empty. The lack of substance caused the edges and walls of the box to buckle when the clay was tapped on and added weight to it.
I wondered if that was what was happening to me. Was I falling apart on the outside because my inside is empty and hollow? Is my heart a wasted space that no longer contains the substance of love? Is this why I’m cracking at the seams more and more each day? Is this why I feel angry all the time and I burst out in unexplainable tears at random moments – unable to escape the feeling that haunts me day and night of constant gloom……..?
And who is it that I’m angry at? Myself? The others? God..? I feel the answer has to be a two-sided cord. I’m angry at myself because I believed a lie and I’m angry at God because he let me do that. For years… For decades… Why?