My Bones Don't Ache From the Snow

but my heart has grown up overnight and it has been broken many times before. and not just from the loves and the lovers but also from those unsuspected. it has been broken by friends i wanted to take with me but left behind instead. broken by family and their effort to understand me in so many complexities they cannot see, and i have chosen not to show. broken over others and for others whose names are not important, at least to this reader. in this now breaking and in each time, a new cast comes forth. a new organ altogether. with new mechanisms for survival and new pathways for the blood to pass, or not. since the last breaking, i have laid my heart asleep, imagining, in its stillness it has healed properly and with the least scarring possible. i have been scared to death of its waking and so stopped any movement i thought to be coming from it. in the past few weeks my heart's waking has let me know it will now have its own way with me. that in its lying still it has in fact not healed properly. and in its now waking it is truely a tired and creaking machine of a heart. its moving challenges my survival mechanisms and sheds practicality as though it never did me any good. its orders are tall and difficult, demanding its immediate use. demanding that i love, in spite of love's impracticality or what it has taught me to well avoid in the past. demanding, that i hurt, if hurting will help the moving. because surely, that is better than its sleeping. this waking is not easy nor does it come quickly. like that of sleeping beauty's awakening, that brings life suddenly in a sweeping light across her city. nor like that of the small girl in mark's version of christ, who arises at the strange touch of deity and smooth roll of hebrew across her body. it is more like waking up to a snow heavy ground that matches the sky and spending hours in bed before crawling out into the world as you have found it. it is slow and hard to get your joints moving at top speed when it is so early. as it it with a heart newly awakened. i am quick to return to my silence, supposing if i just lie still it will fall back asleep and i will be safe in my dreams again. but i find myself rising and leaving my sensibility and my memories of "what happened last time i had these feelings" in bed. i am so very glad in its awakening. i am full in its movement and my inability to stop it because i believe, and dare i say with all my heart, this is something of what redemption, feels like.

suggested song: Time of Need, Ryan Adams
*photograph by andrew lock, i heart red brick walls