SPARK

Caroline Evey, “back to you”
Inspiration Piece

Almost Whole
by Amanda Miska
Response

He is leaving again, and it’s times like these that I’m glad the heart isn’t just a metaphor for the part of us that loves someone.  Because if the heart was the only  thing that kept us alive, the metaphysical heart, I would be long dead, as beaten and broken and opened as mine has been.

Sometimes it almost seems easier that way: to die rather than suffer the anguish of loves lost. Maybe Romeo and Juliet had it right back in the day (even though we call them extremists in our literature classrooms). And they were only teenagers.  I’m 30 years old and still find it hard to bear any kind of loss with dignity. No one remembers the girl who cries in the back of the cab, who soothes herself with pizza and glossy magazines and new shades of hair dye and TV shows with heroines half her age.

There is nothing grand about modern love—not in this digital age of Facebook profiles and nude text messages.  Great romances are rare. We all know too much about each other, but all the wrong things.  The life that goes on inside us, the part no one else can see, it is burying itself deeper and deeper until we’re lucky to find it ourselves—let alone allow another person to plumb those depths and come out on the other side and decide to stay.  It takes superhuman courage.

And I don’t know why, but suddenly I am the lucky one.  I have not been a good enough person to call him a blessing. I have not done enough good in the world to call him my fate.  But I have found this one, this one who takes the ache away. This one who has seen all there is to see of me and chose to keep looking.

It’s his hand against my cheek, my skin flushing back into his palm. The commotion inside of me stills.  The world outside of me slows down and softens. One moment, a single touch, and that is all:  we are suspended in some place where we just exist, without words—or maybe we are the words on some blank page, and we are becoming this story.  And it is realer and more romantic than anything else. It is transcendent, this thing our hearts do, called love.

Usually, disappearing is bad.  But when he reaches for me and everything fades away, it is good. It is the only place where I feel that goodness is possible in this world, in that space between two people as it goes from an expansive plain to a tiny sliver of light. Almost whole: that’s as close as we can get.