[WARNING: I’m not writing this because I’m altruistically sending a note of encouragement to Facebook friends who’ve experienced hard times, just because.

I have the capacity to be that kind, and I’ll be that kind again someday, maybe later today.

But this ain’t that.

I’m not writing this because I’m bored and need attention (although that’s perhaps closer to the truth.)

This ain’t that either.

I’m using this canvas for a selfish, gratuitous, vomit to alleviate the momentary feeling of walking-through-the-world like an exposed tooth root.

This is ex-lax for emotional constipation, and this blank page is the latrine. And most is written in the 2nd person so I can feel all noble n’ shit… but who are ‘we’ kidding (see what I did there?)

You’ve been notified.

That being said…]

There’s something so sweet about a broken heart.

You miss ‘the sweet’ when it’s not bad enough to cripple you –

Like when you’re hurt, disappointed, and annoyed, but you can still stand.

Not that one.

I’m talking about the thick, molasses-like reduction of your humanness and vulnerability, that can only escape through the huge (fucking), cardiac cracks that result from a metaphorical piano falling on top of you from 5 stories, while playing the song of your first-ever slow-dance (was it Reo Speedwagon?), that somehow lands juuust right on your chest so it breaks your heart, but doesn’t kill you; it just leaves you alive-enough to torture Facebook with your horrible, run-on sentences that desperately try to prove that your ‘broken heart’ is specially-worse than anyone else’s ever.

And when I say “sweet,” I don’t mean cute: like the chewy-bits in bubble gum ice cream, or puppy breath, or baby gurgles, or fuzzy caterpillars (haha, God made bugs you want to pet,) or an ‘easy’ anything.

Not that version.

I mean “sweet,” like the deep, delicious, ‘fought-for’ that you failed at,

but afterwards you slept deeper,

and were rewarded with better dreams while awake,

just for trying.

Sweet. Like the feeling of ‘home’ – not a house, but the place where you can relax into who you truly are, and take off the burden of who the world told you that you ‘ought to be.’

Sweet. Like when you realize that the arm you wished you’d had around you when you fell or failed, was your own.

Sweet. Like when the last epithelial cell on the edge of the fingernail of your outstretched soul, tickles the boundary between you and everything else; and then you utter the password-prayer: “fuck it,”

and the boundary collapses,

and for a moment you understand what those bald dudes up in the Himalayas with the saffron robes are on-about.

It’s the very edge of blue, before purple.

It’s the hair-thin line between the engorging satiation of your own generosity,

and the erosive regret of enabling someone’s exploitation of the best parts of you;

or the violating exposure of your worst moments repeated back to you,

by the one you finally trusted to keep them safe.

It’s the sweetness of pushing the boundaries of your heart,

and the ecstasy of making,

or the anguish of missing the mark.

…

My sistah (from another mistah) came to visit me last week. “Just because,” she said.

Then once she was here, she admitted she came to hang-out, support, and check-on the undercover-basket-case that she knew I was hiding from the world.

Her presence made it better, and worse.

I suppose there’s no point in grieving for something when there’s no one around to witness it.

It’s a gift to have someone all cozy and safe to boo-hoo to, with a mop for your snot and tears; and you realize how much you’ve been holding back. Because a puddle of snot-and-tears can’t chop celery for the Chicken Soup that you’re making for your kids and their 8 friends.

And still there’s those moments that you feel like holding it back was better than releasing ‘The Kraken.’

There’s something just so goddamn practical about smooshing-it-down and burying your head in the sand.

Like, when my mom would pick-up on the sadness or sickness beneath my voice when I was trying to push-on. She’d totally wreck my resilience in 6 words:

“Oh, hon. You don’t feel good.”

F@ck. Really? How am I supposed to help this child with math homework from the darkness of the covers I now want to crawl under?

My mom’s empathy crumbled me.

And my Antra did the same last week.

I didn’t feel better, but I felt.

Lately, I wander around in imaginary conversations with my mom’s ‘no-longer-here-ness;’ and I wonder how she’d sweeten this broken heart.

My mother had an extraordinary talent for ‘popping’ me out of the dark with the most right, wrong thing to say…

She’d either be WAY too sympathetic: “Oh Karen, I don’t know how you do it.”

And I’d be annoyed that she wasn’t baffled by how nonplussed I was:

“Well hang on, ma. It’s not THAT bad. I’m figuring it out.”

Or, she’d say something too practical, and unsympathetic when I was WAY ‘plussed’:

“Well, what did you expect?” Or, “Sometimes you just have to suck-it-up!”

It’s only now, in my longing for her on the other end of the phone, that I can so clearly see the perfection of the imperfection of her strategically right, wrong-thing to say.

I know that any eyeball that has endured my drivel to this point, must be attached to a human who has felt something similar.

It’s one of those things that makes us all the same.

The disappointment in lovers, friends, family, and fantasies,

when the outcome you’d hoped for,

or worse, expected,

was not how it ended.

The evidence that: ‘so-and-so was here,’

left a mark,

And then a scar.

Perhaps they tried. Really hard.

As best they could, with the resources they had.

Or perhaps, metaphorically speaking, you bent down to tie the shoe of someone you adored, and they kicked you in the head, while convincing you that they were doing you the favor of evening-out your face.

Either way, there was always the potential that it was going to work out.

Otherwise, you wouldn’t have bought the ticket.

First-person testicles for a finish:

What an incredible adventure that was.

Despite everything, there’s this: “Whoa. I got to feel that.”

If I had known how it would turn-out when it started, I would have still said ‘yes’ to all of it.

The thing that is so sweet about a broken heart?

The ache is evidence that there’s something to break.

(And you get infinity do-overs with the courage to feel it… rumor has-it that the next level has a hidden-in-plain-sight supply cache, with a state-of-the-art Bullshit Detector, “The Ancient Armor of the Unf@ckwithable,” and Wings.)

“If you are falling… dive.” — Joseph Campbell

Rack ‘em up.