HeartBlog: Truth Is No Match For A Loving Heart

I’ve been working on a new book for you. Filled with short stories. I’ve been collecting them and writing them for the years since I finished my last book in 2009. This is one of my favorite things I have written in the last little while, I was going to save it for the book, but I’ve just been thinking alot about where loves goes after it ends, and how everyone expects happiness to be this, place on a map, you can get to, and once you reach it, you will never be sad again. It doesn’t work like that. We are the sum of all of our years, and even the brightest happy days are no match for the honest way a heart can feel. It’s pathetic that when I post writing now, I am scared that everyone will come back to me saying that i do not love Swoon, or that I’m not over whatever pasts make it into my stories. I spoke with Gavin Rossdale once about this, and he said that he continues to write sad songs about his 7th grade girlfriend even though he is with Gwen. Anyways, I think there are tons of you that have had these encounters, and I wanted to share this. Please don’t harrass me.

And I saw him there, standing in the doorway like he had stood to greet me millions of times before. Still strange. Still unkept. It’s so bizarre how someones skin can lay so close to your own skin for so long that you are basically made of the same cells, dna and smells. Then a year or two can pass and your skin becomes like opposite ends of the magnets, and it repells. It pushes you as far away as it can. It acts as though it never was one. As if you never touched, as if you never wanted to. How you can allow someone to be everything to you, the first person you call when someone succeeds, the shoulder you cry on when someone dies. Then somehow you cut that part of your self out, and you heal yourself up with new firsts. How you can have memorized their hairline, their fingernails and their next thoughts. How their body becomes a roadmap to your own. They are the most familiar thing, in this world of stardust and mystery. I knew everything about him, and nothing about him at the same time. It drove me mad, and his secrets ate him alive.

“hey” he says

“hey” I say.

The awkward moment of me wanting to hit him, love him, protect him and expose him all at the same time collides in my brain, time stops and I am looking at the floor, into what I think might be the living room, and I can see the dust flying in the sunbeams, and I can see that he does in fact live a life, one that i am very much not a part of. He lives, and wakes and fucks, and tastes and cries all without me there. He doesn’t stand like this at the door waiting for me, like he does in my mind. He laughs and orders popcorn at the movies, and all of his life in incredibly normal and boring, and I am convinced that I am missing out on something so special that I would storm into that room and sweep the memories of wild nights off the floor if I thought I could hold onto them, even for a second.

“how are you” he says

“I’m good, i’m feeling better. ” i say back.

What I wish to say is, i’m better than I was the day you left. I’m better than I was the time I called you at 4 am begging for you to love me again. I’m better than all the times I tried to put words into your mouth so that i could hear the ones I wanted come from you. I’m better than I was a year ago. I’m better than I was when I stalked you all night on the internet and found out that you love blondes, but you never loved me. I’m better than the times I hurt myself. I’m better than the times I knew better, but I talked about you anyways. Thinking that me talking about you, would lead you to be thinking about me.

I’m better than the way you left me, but I’m not better.

Better would mean that at some point I was okay. I was never ok.

I was never okay with the way you broke me.

I was never okay with the pieces you broke that he had to put back together.

“Congratulations on your engagement” he says

“Oh yea” I say

And he looked at my hand, and made some lame comment about the size of my diamonds, as if the size of the diamonds mattered at all. As if the biggest diamonds in the world could cure cancer and promise everyone eternal life. It isn’t about the diamonds, but it was about the fact that you looked like you were going to puke. Hurts doesn’t it? finding out that someone you pretended to love, can love something else? And in that moment I could have shoved it in your face, and simulatiousnly hugged you when you were upset over it. That’s the problem with love. You can love someone else, but you never stop loving them all. I couldn’t ruin you and save you at the same time. But, I wanted to.

I looked inside the house again, couches I had never seen, pillows I didn’t pick out. I looked inside and saw mail, and shopping bags and teacups and all of the proof that you were alive and not a figment of my imaginary foolish mind. All those times I promised that if i ever saw him again, I would be strong, lustworthy and prove him wrong. That the problem with promising yourself that you will act like a person who you are not. The person you are trying to act in front of has already seen the real you, and will know that you are calculating the strength to act this way. He knows I am a sap. He knows I will love him forever so acting like I don’t is impossible. He will always have the upper hand. I will always look back and only remember the good stuff. I will always believe that he loved me in a special way, that I know he didn’t. Truth is no match for a loving heart. Truths never made me feel any differently.

I looked up to see if this time, this one time, we might allow our eyes to meet, but we didn’t. we would continue to talk to eachothers chins. We would continue pretending that we never saw eachothers passive agressive moments. That all the things we said, in books and songs and 140 character didn’t exist. We would continue pretending we were friends. But, you cant be friends with someone if you cant look them in the eye, and you cant look them in the eye if it will turn into combustable tears or punches. Its hard to love someone so much, then lose them, and then have years to fall back in love with the memory of what you thought they were, and what you thought you were to them. It’s hard to have sing songs of love songs to convince you that the love that you were fooled into believing existed, that didn’t actually exist, existed. Its hard to mix the fanstasy of showbusiness with the reality of showbuiness. It wasn’t like the movies, but it sure sounded like it.

“see you later” he said

“ok” I said.