Take a thing and break it and call it art already

Sometimes you do a thing and later realize just how deadly. Like the old chop-socky kung fu move, I took about a hundred thousand steps after the blow and then my heart exploded, not like into shards like you visualize a heart breaking but expanding outward suddenly and tearing the muscle. Of course it was a metaphor, but it’s also exactly what happened.

So I stood there in the grocery store on that rainy Sunday morning looking at a box of brown sugar instant oatmeal, and it was a full-stop pop that I felt in my whole body like I was nothing but a rubber band and a pair of scissors, which considering how violently I loved and hated the memory of my old life always there just beneath the surface of errand running and paydays it was no surprise that this kind of thing would happen eventually.

I thought how did I get here, one of these shuffling shoppers alone with his list. What was I hoping to accomplish? I’m talking, as always, about her, the one I thought I’d be willing to die for. It turned out, though, as I took my last undignified breaths with a distended heart and dropped that box of oatmeal that what I died for, what I was always going to die for, was my foolish need to be a lonely and unsung tragedy.