anatomy of a heartbreak

My heart gets cold and empty as it sinks with every beat. I don't know if that's what you feel when your heart is being broken.

I had imagined you could actually hear the heart splinter into its atria and ventricles, into its four chambers; and the atrioventricular and sinoatrial nodes would rip, the strings of your heart dangling from its walls; and your capillaries would burst into bruises; your veins, greener, mapping out the sad traffic of your body; your arteries, purpler, as if your heart was once drenched in his wine.

We were looking at each other without knowing that we were. Then, as when you suddenly hear the clock tick as if for the first time, this realization struck me--that the clcok has been ticking all along, that we've been loving each other for so long.

I wake up with a new bruise, fall asleep with another scar.

a simile

David: Your feelings get hurt easily.
Me: Yes.
David: It's like my skin. I understand.

a wish and a fear

I want an eidetic memory of you lest I never see you again.

Years later I would see your brother. No, not in a coffeeshop but in his room, watching his favorite cartoon on his bed, in his blue PJs, all of a sudden sitting up, happy to see me. He's eight. You're there beside me in the warmly-lit room, your hands on me, look who's here Ben, but I can't see you. I'm remembering your brother.

His lambent eyes

I can't see you.

Afterwards, I would open my eyes and see in the dark his lambent eyes, pupils dilated.

I can see you so clearly now.

You

The very act of writing assumes, to begin with, that someone cares to hear what you have to say.

Tobias Wolff

  So finish your coffee. Let’s have a conversation. 

I woke up one morning with this unbreakable fact inside my eyes that you are irreplaceable, that you are impossible to be substituted by anything or anyone else. You are not basil that can be traded in for parsley on my pasta. I cannot fabricate you like I created Paul (whom I wrote unsent letters to, justifying myself that he is real because he exists in my own reality). You are not imagined or supposed. You are here reading me. (Paul could never do that; he could only be read.) You certainly surpass my idea of a perfect character.

I wish I could tell you exactly the things you need me to say. 

There needed to be weeks and months of uninterrupted time to say all the things that needed to be said.

Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

I want to read your mind. What are you thinking about? You look nostalgic. Say it. 

Home. 

I’ve not been home for three years. I don’t know what it looks like, save for the detail that it’s on the seventeenth floor. I always had to move back and forth between two countries so that the coming would become the going and the going would become the coming back. I had to leave the people I loved. Or they left me. (Please don’t leave me yet.) Perhaps this is why I read books so much. Books never left me. The characters all stayed--as if belonging home--in the pages which were bound, on which I could underline, fold to remember, come back to. And one day you came into my life as if you walked out from a book, and I found that you're better than books, that you defy the impossibilities of literature. 

So I write. To go back home, to wake up again, to be your coffee as you are mine. 

An attempt at satire

     Did I ask you for a cake on my birthday? Of course not. I knew something like cake would be too much to handle for you. You’d first have to order, then drive to the bakery, pick it up, bring it to me, and pray dear God let chocolate be her favorite cake, which it's not. I only wanted a handwritten card. Was that too much to ask? I wanted something to hold in my hands what you had held before, that caused you to turn over the words inside your head how best to pen them down. I wanted to feel the same difficult endeavor you underwent of saying something so banal in a moving novelty. Defy cliché. I wanted to guess which verbs you lost, admire and smile at the blithe then wobbly penmanship across the page. The choice of paper, the time and thought it took you, the color of ink that wrote my name and yours. I wanted to feel the careful pressure in my fingers opening the envelope you had sealed, like a child opening a wrapped gift, suppressing the jumpy eagerness at something so happily rare. 


     But an email? At 11:32 PM? What terrible things technology has done to you. I thought you knew better. I thought that you were different, that you’re this unabashedly old-fashioned person, but I guess that’s my impossible conjecture. Do you remember, there was a time when people took out a book, a newspaper from coat pockets, backpacks, and began reading, at airport terminals, subways, and I would silently gauge what they read from the titles and peeked passages. Now their sophisticated hands and ears and mouths and eyes are behind phones. Can you believe it? You’ve become one of them. 


     Books don’t look like books anymore. Letters don’t send like letters. Are you even the same person? (Yes, I know, you’re different yet the same.) 

more nights I couldn't fall asleep trying not to think about you than those I fell asleep thinking of you

For Love

BY ROBERT CREELEY 1926–2005

for Bobbie

Yesterday I wanted to

speak of it, that sense above   

the others to me

important because all

that I know derives

from what it teaches me.   

Today, what is it that   

is finally so helpless,

different, despairs of its own   

statement, wants to

turn away, endlessly

to turn away.

If the moon did not ...

no, if you did not

I wouldn’t either, but   

what would I not

do, what prevention, what   

thing so quickly stopped.   

That is love yesterday   

or tomorrow, not

now. Can I eat

what you give me. I

have not earned it. Must   

I think of everything

as earned. Now love also   

becomes a reward so

remote from me I have

only made it with my mind.

Here is tedium,

despair, a painful

sense of isolation and   

whimsical if pompous

self-regard. But that image   

is only of the mind’s

vague structure, vague to me   

because it is my own.

Love, what do I think

to say. I cannot say it.

What have you become to ask,   

what have I made you into,

companion, good company,   

crossed legs with skirt, or   

soft body under

the bones of the bed.

Nothing says anything   

but that which it wishes   

would come true, fears   

what else might happen in

some other place, some   

other time not this one.   

A voice in my place, an   

echo of that only in yours.

Let me stumble into

not the confession but   

the obsession I begin with   

now. For you

also (also)

some time beyond place, or   

place beyond time, no   

mind left to

say anything at all,

that face gone, now.

Into the company of love   

it all returns.

For and From Dr. C

Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 11:11 PM
Dear Dr. C, 

Thank you so much for coming for the Vox concert tonight! You were right there, front center, and you were the person whom I could sing my heart out for. :)

I am very sorry for not keeping in touch with you lately, but I want to let you know that I love you and will miss you tremendously. I am so lucky to be taught by you. 

I will carry your contagious energy and laughter to Dartmouth!

Love,

Hannah 

Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 11:27 PM

Hannah,
I was so honored to be at that concert!  We have such talented students at LFA, I am amazed that you all do all that you do in school, then belt out those songs at the concert.  Very impressive Hannah.  Don't worry about not stopping by, I see you around and feel your presence all the time.  :)    You are one of those students who I will REALLY miss, more than words can describe.  That is the bad part of the job, getting close to students, then saying goodbye.  But we have another month to chat.  You should concentrate on your classes, AP tests and having fun with your friends.  I am looking forward to the end of the year festivities.  Enjoy these last few weeks because they will go by fast, and there are a lot of special moments that I want you to remember.  So take some time to absorb it all.  You are a one in a million student Hannah!

xox

Dr. C.

I would wake up the next morning and find a new bruise. A blue spot on my left wrist.

Say Yes

Writing, according to Tobias Wolff, is an "essentially optimistic art," for

the very act of writing assumes, to begin with, that someone cares to hear what you have to say. It assumes that people share, that people can be reached, that people can be touched and even in some cases changed. ... So many of the things in our world tend to lead us to despair. It seems to me that the final symptom of despair is silence, and that storytelling is one of the sustaining arts; it's one of the affirming arts. ... A writer may have a certain pessimism in his outlook, but the very act of being a writer seems to me to be an optimistic act.

I reread "Say Yes." I understand so much of it now--even the cryptic ending makes sense, how Ann tells her husband to turn off the light and she walks about the darkened room as "a stranger," how her husband is left nameless.

April 2, 2009

I felt an intense, urgent need to copy down a passage I was reading from Milan Kundera's Identity.

He rose and went toward the half-open door of the bathroom. There he stopped, and like a voyeur avid to steal a glimpse of some intimate scene, he watched her: yes, it was his Chantal as he had always known her: she was leaning over the basin, brushing her teeth and spitting out her saliva mingled with toothpaste, and she was so comically, so childishly focused on her activity that Jean-Marc grinned. Then, as if she felt his gaze, she pivoted about, saw him in the doorway, flared up, and ultimately let herself be kissed on her still quite white mouth (Kundera 34-35).

This scene, as I interpret, is love in everyday life than can be, should be seen among us. We forget too soon that love does not require or expect or demand much. That love is just like Jean-Marc, initially anticipating his love to be romantically erotic and then finding her somewhat funny brushing her teeth, finally giving her a kiss. This love, I love.

Bel Canto, Chapter One

There so taken by the beauty of her voice that they wanted to cover her mouth with their mouth, drink in. Maybe music could be transferred, devoured, owned. What would it mean to kiss the lips that had held such a sound?

Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

The book whose first sentence is my favorite: "When the lights went out, the accompanist kissed her." The author whose friendship with Lucy Grealy struck me in her memoir Truth and Beauty. 

I had wanted to read this book for a long time. I had kept it guardedly on my bookshelf as a reminder, like a reservation for a dinner table. And all this time I had saved it, but for what? I had gifted it to Katerina a couple years ago, by the first paragraph I had judged it a good book--she would like it, it's about music and love and why, it's the winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award. Katerina is a musician, Russian, neuroscience major--she wrote back and told me she loved it. And I am loving it. 

The chapters are long, about thirty pages each, containing voices, many spoken, one sung. Nevertheless I can hear them, not only in English but in Japanese and French and Spanish and Russian and Italian--and in music. On Gen's voice Patchett writes: "It was not a musical voice, and yet it affected him [Mr. Hosokawa] like music." Perhaps the translator's music-like voice comes from his linguistic ability--a different language like a different key.

English must be in E major. Sing with me. 

December 24, 2010

     Dear Paul,
     I am writing to you because I don't know you. Hence my courage. You are somewhere inside my head. Perhaps if I am lucky, you are inside this very world. I could be anyone. You don't have to believe me. I am a poet, not a songwriter. But I wrote a song. It's a duet. You should sing it with me. But you can't yet because the music's unwritten. The composer and I are still working on it. His name is David. He's quite brilliant. He's the one who inspired me to write a short story about you. You're real in the sense that you are a relic of my fabrication. You're not supposed to be real, but you are because you exist in my own reality. You're there but I don't know where I can find you. Are you the one who gave me "delusional" in my dream? I turned that word inside my head a million times trying to understand whatever meaning it held for me. I did not succeed but that doesn't matter because--I don't know--it's meaningless to brood like that. I beg your pardon. You never gave me "delusional," you gave me "delusive." I can't believe my own confusion. Coffee doesn't taste like anything anymore. Do you still read her letters and keep them? I can't think of much else to say. Thank you for everything else. Be my "else." I'll be your everything.

"...death is like that (I can see); it happens every day, but when you see the mourners, they behave as if it were so new, this event, dying--someone you love dies--it has never happened before; it is so unexpected, so unfair, unique to you. ... Why can't everybody just get used to it? People are born and they can't just go on and on, and if they can't go on and on, then they must go, but it is hard, so hard for the people left behind; it's so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you can survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don't want to go with them, you only don't want them to go." 

Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother

Music, When Soft Voices Die

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap'd for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822

Mary Shelley's husband.

I wonder if he wrote it for his wife. The brilliant woman whose hand wrote Frankenstein at eighteen. What must it have been like to ask for the hand of a writer. 

Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.

Paul Tournier

Quote from William P. Young's The Shack. Paul Tournier was a Swiss physician, called as twentieth century's most famous Christian physician. 

     He was looking at her frank forehead as she looked down at her watch to tell him the time. Except she laughed and told him how much of an idiot she was for having it on backwards so it would read upside-down. He didn’t think she was an idiot. He didn’t tell her that because she might take his perfectly neutral opinion differently. He thought of what to say to her, but he could not find the words because there weren’t any inside his head except her name. Lorraine. It was a rare name to have, he thought. Antiquated, almost. Her name reminded him of a rainy day that would be adequately gloomy for him to think of her, a day in which rain would fall on your window with that persistence and rhythm. Her forehead was frank. He watched her try to read her watch upside-down, turning her wrist the other way. Now she looked like an idiot, he thought. He wondered if he should laugh. He wondered if she would take his casual laughter differently. But what did it matter. He liked her enough to stare at her forehead. (She was staring at his hands as she feigned to read her watch. His hands were quite fine for a guy who rarely held a pencil. They reminded her of her father’s hands. She always thought her father’s hands were ugly. They were not the hands of a pianist. But she loved his scars. The old, discolored scar on his right wrist that she called a tattoo, the many charred marks on his fingertips that turned so many pages--the streaks and blemishes that stained his ugly hands were all beautiful to her. She loved most the scar that ran the length of his left fourth finger. The tendons are not right, he had told her. She remembered that it didn’t stretch completely so it hurt him to play. She remembered that it also held his wedding ring. The scars were gone now because her father was dead. Perhaps that was why she took things differently. Yes, his hands are quite fine, she thought. She missed her father.) He boldly took a chance and laughed. She looked at him. Why did he just laugh, they both thought. I’m an idiot. But what did it matter. She looked at him. 

     (It was eight eleven.)

Written for the Teen Woolf project for AP English Literature. My second A+.