Telegrams to Myself

There are days when I want to write my heart a telegram. It would go something like this:

DEAR HEART STOP HURT LESS STOP LOVE ALICIA STOP.

Of course, if ignoring the woes of your heart were easy, there wouldn’t be a thousand million billion songs emoting the feelings of people all over the world who are busy feeling something.

Since simply lazing about and hoping my heart stops wanting to hang out in my throat has never worked out well for anyone, let alone me, I’ve instead employed a different tactic to move forward from any sadness of the past. I’m taking the pieces of what my heart was, picking them up off the hardwood floor where they’ve laid for awhile ever since my heart got all brokenified, and I’m mosaicking them back together.

I can’t glue my heart together — there would be too many weird fissures and cracks, and it wouldn’t sit right. And I can’t just smoosh all the pieces into one big glob — I don’t think that’s very pretty. But a mosaic is meant to make a picture with shards, and remaking my heart to be of the same pieces but ultimately and forever changed is exactly what it feels like is happening. I’m still me, but there is space in between my pieces that is new. And when it’s all said and done, we’ll have the same outcome: a heart.

But it will be different, and ultimately wonderful.

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