Day 8: Heart

There's so much to say about this one word. I'm not going to talk about the band, mostly because all I know is the song Barracuda and that's only because of Guitar Hero. They are awesome, though. I also remember that it was the worst element in Captain Planet. There was a fire guy that could burn stuff, a wind girl that could blow stuff around, an earth guy that could make earth quakes, a water girl that could shoot water and probably freeze stuff and then the heart guy, who had a monkey. I think his power let him control animals and possibly people, which actually sounds pretty useful. Nevertheless, as a kid, I think most of us wanted to shoot fire.

Anyway, this is another vaguely serious post about hearts and breaking them and rebuilding them and...you know what? I'm not gonna do that. Well, I sort of will. But not seriously, though. Listen, hearts get broken. It's a natural byproduct of being alive. Someone's going to die or your significant other is going to find someone else or you're just going to grow apart from someone that you thought you'd be friends with forever. A lot of guys will probably say that that last one isn't really heartbreaking but the truth is, platonic relationships that fall apart can hurt more than romantic relationships because it's harder to express any sort of sadness since most people will think you're a weirdo for investing that much in a platonic relationship. The problem is, we do.

I've said it before, not here but somewhere out there on the internet, that if a heart is broken, all you can do is pick the pieces up and super-glue it back together. In the process, bits and pieces disappear and the heart grows smaller. When I was younger, I think I misinterpreted this, though. When you have to rebuild your heart over and over, you keep track of the important pieces and only lose the parts that you weren't using anyway. So, the parts that love are still there but they're more sensitive and so you have to be more careful with them. Caution is put into every relationship going forward but once those people make it past your defenses, you find that you can love them stronger than you could love the people that broke your heart before.

What does that mean? I don't really know. Hearts are just muscles. Love is just a feeling. It's fun to analyze them, to spin them around and really try to figure them out. The weird thing is that the more you examine them, the more detached you might become. But maybe the more you examine them, the better you'll understand them and the more in tune you will be with them. Understanding yourself is important and I guess it starts with knowing your own heart.