In September I asked this question and I meant everything that follows. I'm posting it now because I think a lot of people go through life shatterings and feel alone and don't know what to do about it. So, here is what I lived through:
What do you do with your life when your heart has been shattered into thousands of jagged pieces of broken glass? All of them crumbled into a glittering heap of broken dreams that were once shiny and new, now lying flat on their faces in the road tarnished by dirt and no longer reflecting hope.
Some people have advised gathering all these jagged pieces of your heart together, picking them up and continuing down the same path you were on before. I've looked at all their sharp edges and balked. Gathering them up will only cut up my hands.
There is no mending of broken glass. It's broken, it can't be put back together, picking up the fragments is dangerous to the safety of the rest of me. I don't need to bleed from other places while I try hopelessly to salvage broken portions of my heart.
Over the last few years, I've sort of put a fence around my heart. Caution tape and orange plastic fences around the scene of the accident. Head on collision, lots of broken glass all in a heap. Every so often on weekends, I stop by to marvel at the wreckage. Even less often I come prepared with gloves and tweezers and I stoop down close to the pile. I'll gather up two pieces of glass and glue them together and then leave them off to the side. Maybe one day they'll function again, but I don't hold my breath. There is one chunk of my heart still functioning and I've left it in there for examination by experts at the scene.
When these experts are on shift they do detective work and try to figure out where things went wrong and I more or less give the whole thing a really wide berth. I don't walk the same path anymore. I don't do the same things. I've essentially left my heart in it's crumbled little pile and carried on with the one chunk I have left.
What's the point of picking up the pieces? The world isn't what we want it to be. It's not our bloody oyster. It's the way it is. Cold, impersonal, brutal and real. It doesn't care if your heart gets involved in a twenty car pile up on the freeway, or is beaten with a bat, or gets thrown against a wall at the end of a relationship. Whether you've lost someone, lost a dream, lost a whole life, lost all hope, it makes no difference. The world is just the way it is and stumbling around brokenly carrying bloody handfuls of shattered glass isn't going to change that.
No, you can't just go on. You'll never be the same. Even if you miraculously managed to piece together your heart and glue it together with a billion uneven fractures into a whole heart you wouldn't be the same. Even if you gathered every tiny sliver of glass up and not a single piece was left lying in the street you wouldn't be the same. You would always have the scars, the fractures that were just a little bit weaker, the chance you could shatter again more easily, and the memory. Even if you melted all of your glass fragments down and reformed them again you would remember that once they laid shattered in a heap, alone, broken, hopeless in a gutter. And you would feel more fragile for it.
So knowing this, knowing all of this and looking at the sad pile of broken glass on the ground that used to belong to me, what do I do? Solitude is calling to me but it offers no respite. It calls in the way that solitude calls to a wounded animal. It wants me to slink off to a solitary place and hope for a peaceful death. My wounds, however, are not fatal. They are of the marring variety, the sort that almost make you wish you'd died but leave you unmercifully in a state of sadly altered life.
Never.
The word that caused this shattering with a single blow. It's finality gripping and crushing and harsh.
So where do you go from here? Part of my life has ended violently, shattered and gone. I see it lying there hopelessly fractured. How can there be a forward now? My cat nature tells me that I cannot go either forward or back. That leaves me left and right. But both options seem hopeless when faced with the jagged remains of what used to be a heart and the dreams that are gone forever.
Maybe I will lie here, curled up near the scene of the crime and wait for an answer on what comes next. I hope God is listening because he is also involved in this wreck. But I have lost hope that he will answer.
So, what do I do?
If you want to know what I did with my life and my heart in the months that followed, the continuation post: Mending a Heart of Glass, will be posted soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment