Passages From The Book Broken For You

Her breathing slowed. She checked in with her heart. She could picture it in there, in its calcified condition, encased in the bodice of her dress. Maybe it hung suspended, caught in something that had once been liquid—like a woolly mammoth in ice, or a dragonfly in amber. Or maybe it bore fossilized impressions. If someone were to autopsy her heart, they’d find traces of life, evidence of eons gone by. Times when she’d been able to feel and the feelings left imprints. Maybe her heart was wearing a cast. Maybe it wasn’t sclerosed at all but atrophied, shrunken, and the cast enclosing it was scribbled over with stories written in a dead language. She checked further. Was there any softness left in there? Any spot that was still unfired, unformed, unglazed? Was there access? Entry? A place still open to impression? No. Her heart was finished. It bore, perhaps, records of life, but it wasn’t alive. Too late for decoration. Too late for effects. Further handling could only result in cracks and fractures. People could cut themselves on the edges of her heart, she was sure of it… she was a hazard to the living. Her intimacies would be with objects, memories, and dreams. She’d hold in her heart only the missing and the dead.


The broken are not always gathered together, of course, and not all mysteries of the flesh are solved. We speak of “ senseless tragedies” but really: Is there any other kind? Mothers and wives disappear without a trace. Children are killed. Madmen ravage the world, leaving wounds immeasurably deep and endlessly mourned. Loved ones whose presence once filled us move into the distance; our eyes follow them as long as possible as they recede from view. Maybe we chase them-- clumsily, across railroad tracks and trafficked streets; over roads new-printed with their footsteps, the dust still whirling in the wake of them; through impossibly big cities peopled with strangers whose faces and bodies carry fragments of their faces and bodies, whose laughter, steadiness, pluck, stubbornness remind us of the beloved we seek. Maybe we stay put, left behind, and look for them in our dreams. But we never stop looking, not even after those we love become part of the unreachable horizon. We can never stop carrying the heavy weight of love on this pilgrimage; we can only transfigure what we carry. We can only shatter it and send it whirling into the world so that it can take shape in some new way.