How much pain can a human heart hold?

Does it stretch beyond boundaries, eventually snapping at the core

How many beats until you are able to sleep?

Eyes wide open against the night, memories like a movie on the ceiling

Tears buried so deep in the body

that sand falls down your cheeks instead

You ask yourself all the questions

Nobody answers back

How many breaths until the lungs give up?

saying, “No, no more inhaling this. You do this on your own.”

How much blood left in those veins?

How much sinew and muscle left in your chest?

How hard does your heart need to work before it breaks?

How many times is it going to get ripped out of your chest

by loving or losing or living?

And how many times will it recover, regenerate the cells

build back the muscles in the ventricles

the aorta

the highway for blood and lifeforce

the carrier for everything you know.

How much pain can a human heart hold?

and why

do you keep trying

to find out?

2/24/22 – AW

February 2022 – Do You Know Where Your Head Is?

Ok, so I’m sewing.

And going to school.

And working 60+ hours a week.

And making huge, giant leaps in the house with projects and delayering and just…nesting.

My Brother visited and brought Natalie and they were fun and delightful and we spent hours in the dining room with them playing cards and eating and laughing and doing all the things I imagined would happen in that dining room.

And now that dining room is full of sewing projects and “paint with diamonds” projects and the accessories and accoutrements that go with both.

We’ve hired someone to come to the house and give us private sewing lessons. That feels decadent and amazing and I am so GOT-DAYUM excited that I can’t stand it. I feel a tiny bit guilty that we’ve become this bougie – just hiring folks to come and give us lessons, but hell, we hire people for other shit, right? Besides, this woman is funny and fun and knows everything and I’m sure I’ll be on Project Runway in just a few months with all I will learn.

My head is full again. Design ideas. Book ideas. Commerce ideas. Projects. Letters. People. I don’t know how it happens but I suspect I haven’t been journaling enough to release the pressure-valve so here we are spastic and dreaming of DOING ALL THE THINGS ALL THE TIME AND ALL AT ONCE.

I am thinking of my Father a lot. The urge to pick up the phone and check on him comes…and eventually goes. I know the cost of contact. Right now, my mental boundaries are holding. Still, the part of me that is not scabbed over with all that has happened between us whispers to me every now and then, “You need him…” but the adult woman in me puts a firm hand on that girl’s shoulder and says, “No, you don’t.” and the girl in me mostly believes her. I am going to get a call one day that he has died. It will both destroy me and release me. I hate both sides of knowing that with a burning passion but I am also resolute that it just is what it is.

My hair is longer. My face has more lines. I’m fatter. I’m aging. I don’t hate it.

I sometimes wonder why I am both exhausted by and exhilarated by contact with others. I suspect connection does that but people don’t like to say it out loud, lest we seem ungrateful for it.

I’ve met a new friend. She’s coming next Sunday for tea. She’s the Dianna to my Anne. I’ve had a Dianna before but that Dianna couldn’t love my Anne exactly where she was so she had to go. I don’t *need* a Dianna but this new friend seems like she could be a kindred. She’s beautiful and charming and smart and funny and I kinda love her from afar. We shall see. <3