Pasadena
O:
Artichokes have hearts, fist-like, chambered, tender, filling the center of them, protected by depths of barbs. Onions, on the other hand, taunt you with their skin which, once peeled, reveals another skin and another. No wonder onions make you cry—they have no heart, no soul.
People say, —have a heart!, or, —he loves her, with his whole heart… Growing up, I never knew what to imagine. I knew these feelings didn’t course through the pericardium, nor etch themselves, graffiti-like, across some red-winged paper hung on a rib.
Even if I interpreted the term loosely, as I later did—our most true self, necessarily within, protected, revealed and given cautiously—I couldn’t place it, and that bothered me. I had no place to stick a pin. At best, I thought, it must all be in the head.
It shouldn’t surprise you—it didn’t surprise me—I eventually discovered someone else had arrived at a similar conclusion, and, for lack of a better term, simply called x it x the “heart-mind.” Really, why use some dopey term when you can just call the thing the “heart-mind” instead?
For some reason, whenever I hear that term, heart-mind, I think of an hour-glass. Whatever we think, whatever we love, gets turned around, conflated, between these two chambers, endlessly, until we really no longer know which is which anymore.
(Incidentally, I think that explains why, sometimes, we don’t know we love someone when we do, or we can’t allow ourselves to love them when we want to—the signal gets lost in the noise, we lose our bearings, we confound ourselves, we can’t tell what we think from how we feel.)
Men more resemble artichokes than onions. Men—not merely women—resemble hour-glasses. Contrary to the romantics however, I don’t consider this thing we carry within us, this tedious instrument, a brave and resilient thing, but rather, an intensely fragile one, an ocean in a snifter.
When I finally knew I loved her, I told her, and she, summarily, “broke my heart.” My love, an onion, made an onion of me too. I yet wonder though if somewhere she remembers me, whether perhaps, inside her, an hourglass still turns for me—maybe it will turn like that forever.
Within me now I seem only to have shards and grit—slicing and scouring me, abraiding and miscarrying my mind and heart both. Eventually men must take after the oyster. We must make pearls, else endure an endless agony.
:O