This world has a strange way of making you fall in love with things that die… flowers, hopes, people. One day, the flowers are blooming with color. The air is filled with the scent of rose, hopes linger in the glitter of sunlight, falling from the heavens in sheets of drizzling rain. The people love you, the ones you are closest to; they hold your hands, laugh with you, pray for you. The violin of your heart is constantly playing the songs of joy, of faith, of wonder.
Then, one day, you wake up to the thundering clouds, blazing light, and flames engulfing your world. Your roses are wilting, fast. It smells like burnt hopes, and the ashes of your hopes settle like soot on your lungs, around your heart. The people who were with you just yesterday dug holes in the ground, pulled soil over their beings and went to sleep forever.
If the heart wasn’t made to bear loss, the human heart would be a puddle of tears and blood at the smallest inconvenience. But the human heart is a sponge that simply absorbs and expands and expands and expands…until it can no longer expand.
I wonder what the heart of an 80 years old woman looks like? Does it have flowers growing on it? Does lush ivy grow around it, pumping blood? Are there cuts and bruises mended with band-aid? Is the heart, in fact, split in two and held together with thread? Does the 80 years old woman massage it with her 80 years old sorrows every night? Perhaps she uses the balm of regrets and forgotten promises on the broken bits, on the roses that refuse to grow.
If I dig graves one day, will I find hearts beating among the bones? Will there be puddles of pain around them? Will there be floating gardens of roses in those puddles? Will the hearts be swimming in the remnants of life, and will each heart be beating out notes of violin that tell the story of each grave?
I wonder if each bouquet of fresh flowers that we place on graves are a testament to the beating hearts that yet thrive under all that soil? Surely, if a whole lifetime of this world the heart could bear, what is 6 feet of earth in its glorious wake?