Shell, broke.
by mlhart
Hanging heavy in the room, you want to pluck it from the air, a tangible note weighted in the palm of your hand – the heft of tradition sitting solid in the curves of your head, life, fate and marriage lines, creases reaching out past mercury, sun, saturn and jupiter, stretching decades beyond your own understanding, pitting a deep-seeded sense of safety low down in the hollow of your stomach reminding you, yes, love, you and me, we’re all in this together; suffering is all relative to our own experience, it be in me the way we share breakfast, eggs of the same fowl prepared a little different, preferences considered by the cook before that shell be broke open on a hot skillet not washed between meals on the short order line at Route 99 on Sunday morning’s after church. Empathy is easier than you think because the extent of that way I feel is just the same as you. You is me is we is us – the fiction of life caught up in song, the refrain a catchy bit skipping, a record scratched because it was loved so very much, a rooted scar ripped in a perfect line across your favorite song and though you try your best to remember the words you realize in that instant, it’s just gone.
Valdy and Suzie and Shari and Dakota Dave singing songs for Haunted Hearts on cold winter nights when we – you and me and the neighbours from down the street – unbundle indoors on eves best left to courageous winds of change whipping at eighty kilometers an hour down streets older than you and me combined; that moment of pitch perfect harmony drawing experience nearer with the twang of a guitar string, slightly out of tune but nonetheless singing truth of a time we may not have experience of but know in our hearts it’s true if only because Grandpa or Grammie said it to be true.
xoxo,
M.L. H’art
