unmapped raze your heart is important, he told himself. that's the thing you only give to someone when you think they might give you theirs. when you think you each might hold the other's heart and whisper things to it in a language it doesn't speak but understands like a dream it almost remembers. you're not wrong to want to protect it. that doesn't make you cold. it makes you careful. there are people out there who will tear up swollen hearts just because they've got the nails and teeth for it. just because they can. sometimes he wanted to be one of those people. to hit back at some part of the world he felt had wronged or wounded him. but he couldn't. so he locked it away, the pulsating thing that was the darkest red he'd felt but never seen, and he only showed parts of it to the ones he thought he could trust. and often he trusted the wrong people. he folded the mangled parts beneath the strong parts where they wouldn't be seen, and he carried his own heart in his hands, feeling it fight him with every choice he made. we are all cartographers trying to navigate a place that can't be drawn on any map. a place that makes us feel like crying when we should be laughing. a place that is a muscle the size of two fists. a place called now. 210904 ... unhinged i thought i knew all the dark recesses of my heart after decades of struggling with depression then my dad died like the cold dark water lapping on the beaches of the puget sound like forests i've never explored full of old pine trees hundreds of feet tall like the sharp craggy peaks of the geologically younger and active pacific plates foreign but familiar 210904 ... tender square we drove the route between grandma’s house and ours at least once a week for friday night sleepovers. grandma would make brea and i macaroni and butter and let us watch all of tgif, our favorites. sometimes she’d walk us to fred’s variety spot for candy bars, or let us run through the sheets drifting on the clothes line before she folded them. when mom would pick us up next day, i’d sit in the backseat of the minivan buckled into the center seatbelt and lie along the cushion with my eyes closed, trying to visualize all the houses and shops that i had watched so many times through the window. my body memorized each turn; the first left was onto jefferson, the right that followed was onto wyandotte, and so on. the ride felt longer than it typically did when i practiced this, the stoplights like suspended hours. sometimes i would open my eyes to see if the image in my mind matched the reality, to see if i was close. it’s an energy i carry with me decades later in meditation, with the morning affirmation “i know the direction i’m heading, even if the path ahead isn’t clear.” 210914 what's it to you? who go blather from