BlogHer, my beautiful BlogHer, is asking us to write a Letter to My Heart.  This is mine.

Dear Heart,

They say that scar tissue is the strongest kind.  If that really is the case, dear heart, you must be Arnold Schwarzenegger;  not as he is now, all saggy with age and lethargy, but as he was back in his Kindergarten Cop days.  It’s good for you  to be strong like that, but there is, of course, a downside.  To get that super-strong scar tissue, you must first let yourself be slashed, gashed, torn, crushed, and broken.  Any kind of relationship can do this; it doesn’t have to be a romance, but that is what you’ll be relating here.

In grade school, it was you and Keith’s heart, but all that meant was that you and he sat together at the lunch table, made sure you got the same grades on things so you’d be in the same reading circles, and  gave each other the one BIG valentine in the package.  In sixth grade, you opened up one of the tiny valentines from him, and knew it was over, whatever “it” might have been.

In eighth grade, you got a love letter that made you daydream all through an important science test.  You failed the test because of love, which was an omen of things to come.

In high school, you were busy, but it was mostly messing with other hearts, not yourself.  It wasn’t until your junior year that you got yours, as they say.  It was your first experience with really opening yourself up, and as you sat in that audience and watched HIM on the stage, singing directly to  YOU, you knew it was all over but the shouting.  What you did not realize, however, was that you had fallen head over heels for the character, not the person.  This was a flaw, Heart, that you would be repeating many times.

You were a late bloomer, Heart, but you made up for lost time once you got to college.  Your weakness was for singing hearts, and more than once you fell hard and gashed yourself open over the lyrics to a song, a strut across a stage, the strum of a guitar. . . . only to draw back when a real person’s heart tried to speak to you.  You were slashed, raw and bleeding, over Curly,  over Pilate,  over the Padre, over Nathan Detroit,  over a few walk-ons in a few opera seasons, over Billy Bigelow,  and over the youngish professor who taught you Interpretive Recitation.  There was a dalliance with one of Bobby’s Knight’s winning season’s hearts, but it ended the minute you tasted cigarette smoke on his lips.  One heart talked you into taking Advanced Mammalian Physiology, even though you didn’t have any of the prerequisites.  It was the only course you ever failed;  you just couldn’t deal with either 7:30 in the morning, or with slowly snuffing out little laboratory animals’ hearts.

You hung out with a lot of miscellaneous hearts, none of which bothered to extend a string to you, and vice versa, but you thought of this as  “practice.”  You considered a weekend without another heart to play with, a wasted weekend.

Three engagement rings later – one of which you still have, tucked into the bottom of a box – you found a another heart that spoke to you, but in a language you couldn’t fully comprehend, and you fell hard.  You had already met this heart’s brother, and this heart was the complete opposite of you, and although it is very true that opposites do attract, more often than not the very things that attracted most will be the very things that annoy you the most, and “they” are right, both times.  As usual, it took you a long time to figure this out – four years, this time.

Towards the end of this oppositional relationship, you ran into an old friend’s heart, and suddenly, for the first time, you found yourself wondering how it would be to know this heart better.  The old friend’s heart  used to sit beside you in Advanced Speech class in high school, and even called you a few times in college to take you to see some shows.  It never really occurred to you that this friendly heart would ever mean anything more, but at your sister’s wedding, you turned around, in the front pew of the church, in the middle of the ceremony, and saw that heart in the back of the sanctuary.  It wasn’t looking at the bride.  It was looking at you.

Thirty-two years later, it still is.