So it’s like that
plastic bag in that movie.
After the onslaught of rain and wind bursts take rest for a moment, and you catch a good view of a pink and orange sunset drifting behind a line of trees on your drive home from work. A feeling of contentment surges into your skin at the sight of a dusking landscape, and somehow the usual downpour-- due to come back very soon-- does not seem cruel, but beautiful. All the people and the living we experience brilliant.
The next downpour is the ending of a passionate love affair. Cut a little too short, and you knew it was coming, but the pain still consumes your stomach as he tells you he must pursue this new relationship. We are not each other’s usual type, I know. And I’d call him my Hubble, but it’s not that simple. He smiles at me as he walks away, as my friends drag my hand to the party in the other direction, and I realize he’d touched me more than I thought he could.
A friend at my side is being harassed by her ex-husband for dating another man. Tonight she stops in to see the one she’s been seeing and he tells her he can’t see her this weekend. His ex is in town. He is brusk. The friend is grabbing at her stomach, struck by how his demeanor had changed, amazed at his coldness two days after they had sex for the first time.
There is no preparation for these events. The crowds surrounding us downtown are filled with the same atrocities. We are not new girls to this. Hearts are broken every day.
She and I talk to acquaintances on the street before we head home, and I see an ex-boyfriend from years ago flirting with a sweet-looking girl. He takes her hand and they walk the opposite direction. He doesn’t know I hope the best for them. He doesn’t know I saw that sunset earlier in the day, and that this crazy night was a sort of a havoc with wondrous parts to me.
But the wondrous bits don’t ease the hurting stomach.
There is no one and nothing to blame for all this— we seek them out sometimes, these type of agonies. We hunt down our bits to chomp. On occasion we will choke on the bit, swallow it whole, and it will rip us up inside. This is living, this. We make macramé of our souls.
Look at the lacework of pieces that make us up in the end.