heart_pieces_everywhere ovenbird On Valentine’s Day in Kindergarten we played a game in the afternoon. We were each given half a paper heart, cut down the middle in a jagged, irregular line. Our job was to run around the classroom until we found the person with the other half. Off we went, squealing and holding our broken hearts up to each other in the most unselfconscious way. I remember the press of bodies, the feeling of anticipation, the focus that five year old me gave over to finding this elusive piece of heart, except I never did. Two of us were left at the end with heart pieces that didn’t have a match. We looked at each other, maybe thought to cry, but then shrugged, laughed, carried on with our day. The memory replayed often in my mind as I grew and eventually took on the role of foreshadowing. So many years later it feels less funny to have a heart that doesn’t match the world no matter how I twist it, trying to force the edges to line up. I’ve spent my life tending to that bleeding margin, laying my heart down next to the shape of things: the nibbled edges of a wild mushroom, the twisting form of the Fraser River, the deadly cliffs that plunge into the North Sea, the soft outline of my sleeping dog, the tenuous form of notes rising from the piano while my daughter practices downstairs…Sometimes there is relief, catharsis, a moment of temporary elation when everything clicks into place, but it’s a wound that just won’t heal. The edge remains raw and open to everything. The truth is that there is no escaping grief. We can only hold it up to each other and ask to be seen. And in that act of witnessing there is a strange kind of joy. We show each other the broken pieces and, suddenly, we’re laughing. 250328 what's it to you? who go blather from