Intermission: The Heart

The heart is a curious, unpredictable, and maddening thing. It guards itself ferociously from those who wish it potential harm, speculating everyone’s intent, asking for secret passwords, interrogating them, suspecting the worse, guilty till proven innocent; and then, without warning, it becomes completely vulnerable. It lays down its arms and the soldiers disperse leaving only a small, naive child with all the love and trust in the world. What is this all or nothing of the heart?

What’s even more irritating is the other hearts it chooses to trust. My heart, for example, has a selection technique that most people might regard to be anti-intuitive and questionable. It’s attracted to the seedy, vulnerable, passionate vagabond with an uncertain past, which has left my heart with dozens of hairline fractures occurring throughout my twenties. And each time it hurts that unbearable, excruciating, “I-want-to-die” pain I know you have all experienced (and if you haven’t, what are you waiting for?), your armies rebuild stronger, more vigilant and tireless, and determined to not have another break through their Red Rover wall again. Some people call it baggage, some people call it caution; it’s those things, yes, all wrapped up with a bow of bitterness. However, who would I be, had I not had that soul-crushing love and heartache? I certainly wouldn’t be able to speak intimately of it. I would be a heart of less substance, maybe, unable to relate or feel pain when my friends endure aches of the heart too.

And yet through all the disappointment, let-downs, and seedy, vulnerable, passionate vagabond hearts with uncertain pasts, we still yearn to love again. The heart believes it will never let someone like that in again; it’s like a virus, always mutating and adapting with each outside blow. But the child is still at the core, and as time goes by it longs to escape again from the confines of the compound. And though we will not admit it, we know we’d give up everything and anything for that child to feel love again.