Pieces of my heart

Originally posted on Medium, Dec 11 2016

I had the strangest sensation while I was walking this morning: I felt the spaces in my heart made by each person I have loved, and these spaces had the exact shape of each person, shaped by them, by we. There was room for all of them in there, and it felt like time disappeared and became immaterial, and I could touch each one of those places and be in that place with them right in that moment.

I got excited for a minute, and thought: time actually doesn’t matter! But it does. The body slowly, slowly ages and changes function, the mind tracks all those busy things that we do in the modern world. Time is what allows us to meet each other.

Then I realized that, while time is perceptible in many ways, the heart does not recognize time. Perhaps this is why heartbreak and loss are still felt so keenly out of nowhere: after we thought we’d gotten over it, after all that time, and after all of that effort to fill the space the person left, that song suddenly plays on the radio or an image flashes before our eyes and it can bring us to our knees, the sharp pain of that space in one’s heart that will never be filled.

If you remove time from the equation of the heart, then I love you now and always, and time becomes immaterial. Even if time took my body and my mind away from you, even if the kaleidoscope of the imperfections of being human occluded my view of you, even if I never get to see you again, the space you made in my heart lives on, outside of time. Thank you.