Tuesday

BOTTLECAP
If I sent you a message in a bottle,
would you run to the Thames and swim to me?
You've broken my heart, just as I intended,
but I never knew the salt-sweat taste of Kent
could change my mind.

We stared at screens, the sky, each other.
Searching for exactly what we intended to find.
Now is the time I need to you read my bottled-up feelings:
the messages I tried to send,
the green-glass bottle words I could never say.

What would we have been? sits upon my tongue.
Waiting for you to meet me, soaking and tired,
to meet my questions with the answer I intended.
Dripping from your lips.
We would have been...

If I sent you a message in a bottle,
would you allow me to run down to the Thames
and catch you both?
My flesh and sinews flexed over your frame,
writhing to reach you, just as I intended.

If I sent you a message in a bottle,
What would we have been?
On the tip of my tongue, on the edge of the Thames,
We would have been.
Laura Harpool

Dearest Darcy...
It seems insane to the common person to think of someone jumping out of a two-engine plane without a parachute. The first 9,999 feet would be exhilarating, without doubt. It's only that final harsh foot of sky that delivers a fatal blow to the adrenaline rush, the fall, and the beautiful life that fell the first 9,999 feet.

So, while only insane person would jump without a parachute, why are we expected to fall into love when we know our hearts will ache or break inevitably: all in the search to find the ONE that will be our parachute? The heartbreak comes in any number of forms: the first love lost, the breakup, giving up a lover to regain a friend, being dumped, or realizing that you were never really loved in the first place. Sure, sometimes only a little part of our heart is torn away, but even that little fractured heart feels like an insurmountable loss. If only our selfish hearts would stop beating with their fractures and breaks scarring our entire insides.

But heartache is just as dangerous. Missing the one that left, missing the one you left, needing an ex-lover to love you again, staying in a relationship that is changing in ways that hurt, needing the relationship to stay the same. However, having a heart ache does not mean that any love is lost or heart is broken...it just means that the love we maintain will cause us to ache. And sometimes, that ache doesn't go away. It eases over time, but a constant throbbing ache remains deep inside a heart that just can't let love go.

So, lets say that you're aboard this two-engine plane, in the open doorway about to jump. You realize that you don't have a parachute, but you decide to jump anyway. You convince yourself that the fall will be worth the eventual tortured end. Anyone watching you jump would deem you completely insane. But, when we fall in love, we are seen as doing what comes naturally to most of humanity.

Darcy, we fall just as fast, and just as hard into that first free-fall of love. And we too eventually will land on solid ground, but instead of a fatal foot at the end of a voluntary jump, we land in the midst of heartache and break. Non-fatal, but more painful than ceasing to feel upon landing. And we fall again and again and again.

Dearest Darcy, are we insane to fall 9,999 times just to find the parachute we've needed all along?