Heart

How's your heart today?

It's supposed to be an innocuous question. A quick query dropped into a work day before someone sends me a poem that he anticipates will make my heart explode. It's innocuous because I've been blathering on about the book I've been reading lately and how intense it's been. Reading the book feels simultaneously like having someone run a cheese grater over your heart and presenting you with a bowl of the result and getting a hug from a good friend who is suddenly in your life after living abroad for two years.

Anyway, the question hits me with all the force of a car accident. It's casually devastating in a way I won't be able to articulate for a few days at least.

***

My have (a) friend(s) who tell(s) me I'm a reactive person.

It's not (I think, I hope) a value judgement. It's merely a statement of fact. You react more to things than other people.

I heard it most recently and in not so many words on Sunday. I was sitting on my running partner's couch, wrapped up in a fluffy blanket and reading Love Minus Eighty.

And just sobbing. 

In the kitchen one of my friends (graciously making me dinner while I had a breakdown on his couch) said: "I think Kel's book is making her cry."

The immediate reply was "I don't think that's entirely unusual."

***

I do not understand my male friends.

They are often the ones who call me reactive, who tease me about how I responded to Much Ado About Nothing or who ask about my mood before they send me a poem by Auden or who pull a puzzled face when I'm bawling on the couch over a novel. 

I live in the Upper Midwest, the goddamn capital of emotionally reserved men, so I suppose it shouldn't come as such a surprise to me that the majority of the men in my life are bemused when I do some exuberant thing.

I adore brainy, cerebral guys, so I suppose it shouldn't come as such as surprise to me that the majority of the men in my life are bemused when I burst into tears during every episode of season five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 

It doesn't fucking matter. 

Every single time one of my male friends expresses bewilderment over an emotional reaction to something I end up open-mouthed. 

Lord, I know how this sounds. Like I'm trying to write a romantic comedy. But the older I get and the more men come into and out of my life the more I wonder: 

Do men all have the emotional capacity of Peter Pan? 

***

My favorite book of poetry isn't Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver. It's not Ballistics by Billy Collins or The Duino Elegies by Rilke. My favorite book of poetry is Good Poems for Hard Times as edited by Garrison Keillor. 

I love the book for a lot of reasons. The poems collected in it are fabulous. They actually make you feel better when you're down. My mom discovered it once while riding in my car and made marginalia on a few of the poems that delights me when I stumble across it. I had it signed after a particularly wonderful night seeing A Prairie Home Companion (and one of my favorite bands!) for my birthday with two people I love very much. 

The thing that I love most about it is G.K.'s introduction. I know, I know. What a weird thing to love, but I do. It's full of bits that I carry around inside of me and call to mind when I'm upset. My favorite bit though is a question that has little to do with what poetry should be or how poetry can change your life. It's a casual aside in a long paragraph and asks only: 

How often in the past week did anyone offer you something from the heart?

***

For years I thought that what I wanted, what I needed in a partner was someone a little cool. A little distant. Someone who didn't quite have as many emotions. That's how relationships are supposed to work, right? You're supposed to make up for the deficiencies in one another. If I insist--and I do--upon being so reactive I need someone who isn't going to be. 

Fuck that. 

I'm a heart-on-my-sleeve kind of a girl. I don't know how to be any other way. I don't want to be any other way. I want to go star-gazing and shout with delight when I catch a shooting star. I want to be so moved by a concert that when I wake up the next day I've lost my voice and hurt all over from dancing so hard. 

More than that, I'm the kind of girl who regularly offers something from the heart. My default setting is that if you've made it in under my defenses, I'm going to love you. Inconveniently, stupidly, (disturbingly?), completely. I'm going to offer you a thousand microscopic pieces of my heart in words and songs and books. In late night conversations about God and cross-country road trips. 

And . . . I'm finally ready to admit it. That kind of life isn't one for someone with the emotional capacity of Peter Pan. I don't need someone's heart to explode during Wagon Wheel or to stop breathing while watching Shakespeare. But I need someone who is going to understand why those things happen to me without looking so damn confused. 

I need someone who won't have to ask how's your heart today?