Bleeding Hearts

“Not that it was beautiful
but I found some order there.
There ought to be something special
For someone
in this kind of hope.
This is something I would never find
in a lovelier place, my dear,
although your fear is anyone’s fear,
like an invisible veil between us all…
and sometimes in private,
my kitchen, your kitchen,
my face, your face.”

“For John, Who Begs Me Not To Enquire Further”
                         Anne Sexton

Speaking of poets, T. S. Eliot once rather famously observed that April is the cruelest month.  Then again, Eliot didn’t know about how much fun my friends LS and MH are having this February.  

LS recently broke up with a guy with whom she decided to “explore a relationship” (as they say nowadays) after being friends with him for 30 years.  So, not only is her heart broken, she has lost a friend.  Ouch.

HM got divorced some 6 months ago from the father of her children.  She didn’t want the divorce.  She is trying to go forward as a single mom, which is a situation she never anticipated.

LS doesn’t sleep anymore.  She just. doesn’t. sleep.  She doesn’t sleep on Ambien even.  She has a high stress job as the manager of a furniture business.  She also teaches aerobics, cares for her elderly parents and volunteers with a local road race.  If she doesn’t get a visit from the Sandman pretty damn soon, she fears that she will suffer from exhaustion.  She is the sort of high energy person that would make caffeine nervous.  Exhaustion for her would pretty much be pretty close to “dirt nap” for anyone else.

HM is just the opposite.  HM can’t get out of bed in the mornings.  She is in administrative management.  This requires her to attend meetings, endure conference calls and send out faxes.  All of which is pretty damn tough to do with the covers over your head.  Her doctor said she was depressed-thank you Sigmund Freud- and prescribed her some pills.  But they upset her stomach, or so she thinks anyway.  Besides, she would rather snap herself out of it without drugs.  Her parents are beside themselves.  They urge her to please,please,please get some help, if only for the sake of the boys.  So she went to a junior pastor at her Mother’s church.  The sonuvabitch asked her out.  Thank you, St. Francis.  So much for pastoral counseling.

I have never met HM.  I have business dealings with her.  But every now and again, she will call me from her office in Mississippi and in her small sad voice say, “Do you have a minute for me?”

LS is a white girl from the city.  HM is a black girl from the country.  These poor sweet babies don’t have much in common with each other except that they both once loved and they were both once suffused with the kind of hope spoken of by Sexton.  They have that in common.  And on a less lofty note, they both have me.  Which truly passeth understanding.  I am totally inept when it comes to relationships.  And to plumb my deepest and best thoughts in this regard is like unto asking Michael Brown for advice on emergency management.

But this much I get:  When your ordered world, the one where you used to find his face or her kitchen, disappears with the snap of a finger-well-it’ll fuck you up quicker than a motorcycle.

HM wants to know when her old self will come back.  LS asks if her heart will ever quit hurting.  

God, babies.  I just don’t know.  I also don’t know when you will quit playing the last year y’all were together over and over and over in a continuous loop in your head.  I don’t know when you will be comfortable sitting by yourself in church.  I don’t know when you will feel like setting foot in a favorite restaurant again.  And if you do, I hope the food is good, because the ambience has changed.  I don’t know when you will stop dreading to look at a calendar but you know that some dates contained thereon once had meaning for you and you alone. I don’t know when you will stop wondering why you couldn’t make it work, or how you couldn’t see the signs of trouble.  I don’t know when you will quit beating yourself up about how a smart person (and don’t forget that you are a nice person) like you can’t transcend your patterns.

I don’t know.  I don’t know.  I don’t know.

As God is my witness I don’t know.

But I know that you will.  You will stop.  You will stop in time.

In the meantime, LS the sleepless one, says that she would throw herself out a window except that everybody would still expect her to clean up the mess.

And that’s just it isn’t it?  Anne Sexton put it this way: “the choice.  Only she wasn’t exactly speaking entirely metaphorically.  And she probably is not the greatest example on earth to use in a piece like this seeing as how she, well, killed herself.

But LS isn’t going to throw herself out of a window anymore than I am going to take up square dancing.  However, her larger point is well taken.  There is too much stuff to do and protracted melancholy is not permitted of most people.  There are kids to raise, parents to help, clients to represent, and money to make.  People are depending on us.  A charge to keep I have and it does not matter that the ocean is vast and that my boat seems so small against it.

Or, if you require something more practical, consider this observation by Dorothy Parker, another famous poet:

“Guns are unlawful.
  Nooses give.
  Gas smells awful.
  Might as well live.”

Live or die.  Might as well live.

That’s the best thing I advice I can give to you poor sweet babies.

What the hell.  People are depending on us.  Might as well live.

It’s not exactly Dr. Phil.  But it’s the best I can do.

You girls know where to find me.