The Poetic Heart

Over the weekend, the slam team met up. We had an amazing time getting to know each other. We told two truths and a lie. We discovered that none of us were good liars. I suppose that is a good thing.

We told each other stories. The topics ranged from past experiences to sprawling epics about travel. And love made many appearances. One of our team told an amazing story about finding and losing and finding love while trying to find himself. The team was enthralled. I kept wondering: Is someone out there searching for me? Am I searching for someone?

I wanted desperately to know that someone out there had my eyes engraved into their memory but were stuck searching for my name. I began to imagine that someone was searching in vain on Google Images with keywords like "green shirt" or "blue jeans" or "understanding eyes" or any number of other keywords they had stuck in their morse-code heart beats.

I suddenly wanted to browse every Craig's List missed connection post spanning the past ten years to see if someone desperately wanted to know that I was more than just a memory. I wanted to know if I was more than just a memory to someone; I wanted to know that I was someone's wish. I wanted to make someone's wish come true.

I wanted to dial a random sequence of ten digits on my phone and, when the person picked up (which I was sure would be a beautiful voice), I would say something like "There are ten billion possible numbers I could have dialed, but somehow I knew this was the one to call." It would have been romantic. Because she is a hopeless romantic too. Except recently I've only felt hopeless.

Even now, there is a cage surrounding heart. Each beat feels dangerous like a car speeding down a sharp-curved road with no brakes. But brakes feel dangerous because I feel like brakes have been breaking my chances at finding love – as though if I could just let my heart go and let life take me where it will and have the confidence to give that beautiful person a compliment, maybe it wouldn't feel so broken. I'm torn in two different directions at once, and comfort is so much more pleasant than its antithesis, but life is not meant to be pleasant. Not all the time. And poets, of all people, should know this.

Poets are the ones who dig up their pasts and tell these stories to complete strangers in order to share something with people we may never meet again. It's strange. And beautiful. It's art. And it's real, and it's truth. I don't know what it means all the time, but it gives me license to breathe.

So if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go take a breath and tell that one person just how beautiful I think they are.

I think you should do the same.

If nothing else, it will give you a beautiful story to tell.