I.
I was brushing up on my French this morning for the first time in, I don't know, over half a decade, and I really think the French are onto something.
Here I was, wondering to myself, '"Who decided that the word for 'cat' is a masculine noun in French? Aren't cats supposed to be feminine creatures?" Then again, I am realizing, who decided cats were feminine and dogs were masculine? "Man's best friend," and all that nonsense. I haven't seen many women so avoidant as felines; it's generally men that so quickly flip the switch between laying their head on your chest and adamantly shunning your advances for days on end.
II.
The hospital is so busy today, so noisy and unruly, but I wonder to myself, looking at my neediest patient, if he misses the feeling of human touch. How long has it been since he felt the brush of skin on skin?
I put my gloves on anyway.
III.
Sitting outside of any McDonald's in the main stretch of my city, you will hear classical music playing rather-too-loudly over speakers situated in the doorways.
"Why do they DO that?" I remember asking my father, when I was too old to think in fragments but too young to turn my feelings off.
"They play the music like that to keep homeless people away," he said matter-of-factly, and kept walking.
I remember, even then, realizing how ridiculous that was. How distasteful. My heart felt like it had torn open, just a sliver, but still. What evil person thought to themselves that beauty was best used as a weapon? And how did they know that the urine-soaked vagrant hadn't played violin before he slept on the pavement?
IV.
Maybe that's how hearts grow so big in the first place. Like any other muscle, they tear under stress, and grow a little larger.
Is it any wonder my chest feels insurmountably heavy?
V.
I thought that by now I'd have found a new way of writing. Less T.S. Eliot copycatting with the Roman numerals, less talk of "heart" as though it were anything but a physical mass, a vital organ. I thought there'd be less cheese on the pasta now, so to speak. But here I am, as close to thirty as to sixteen, and I'm still pouring prose merely confessional in nature. Nothing new under the sun, always Biblical allusions and forgetting that "effect" is a noun but "affect" is both a verb and a psychological term...it's hard to say what, exactly, I wanted, but I think "to be smarter" begins to scratch the surface.
VI.
Sometimes I wonder if I would feel more comfortable if everyone who touched me wore latex gloves, too. Not because I don't like to be touched - on the contrary, I crave it in unbearable waves like a dope fiend at the end of his stash. Maybe it would just feel more "correct." Something in me repeats, with the rhythm of a torture device, that I am untouchable, false, diseased. If you get too close, I might never stop writing about you. If you keep your hands on me too long, I may never cease wishing you'd put them there again. Maybe a protective layer, present at all times, a reminder that love is not ethereal but chemical, would serve me well in my search for peace.
VII.
I am half a step away from becoming a nihilist. I just wish someone would push me over the line. I don't want to say, when asked why I'm cold and unfeeling, that I became that way of my own free will.
VIII.
It's the feelings that will get to you. It's your right brain that's out to kill you. It's love that is going to eventually kill us all.
Pragmatic marriage-pushers say that love is a choice, but that isn't the kind of love I'm talking about, and they know it. I don't know a lot of people who chose to stay together merely for the good of their children, or for the strength of their assets, or for the convictions of their religion, and found themselves in a heap on the bathroom floor by the sum of their choices. I'm not talking about magnanimous compassion, or Christian charity, or tireless devotion, when I say that love is the culprit, the thief in the night. I'm talking about being set on fire, with a love so white-hot that walking away would be suicide. I'm talking about the love that brought me to the brink of insanity, motioned broadly at the canyon, and left me with only a penny to throw over the edge for my wishes.
IX.
Something about the fact that "chaos" is "chaos" in French and English brings me such comfort in these moments of lone silence. The word itself carries the vibration of the state of being. They couldn't think of any better way to say, "Everything is a fucking mess, and you can't save me."
