Recently I have been relaxing by stabbing soft hearts.
If this sounds terribly violent, it is. If this sounds terrible, it isn’t.
If this sounds like CAT’s idea, you’re starting to understand.
Blame my gentlest friends for this turn of events. (I do not mean the cats, who are approximately my thirtieth-gentlest friends. My seminary buddies never left me a half-lizard in a solarium. Yet.)
I was a cat in need of a cool-down. Writing may be my favorite thing to do, but it leaves me electrified. When you are a breathing can of carbonation, you need hobbies on speaking terms with sleep. My gentlest friends heard my hummingbird heart thrumming from three towns over, and they had an answer.
Which brings us back to the stabbings.
If you have ever seen tiny fuzzified hearts or cats or walruses, you are familiar with wool felting. As soft and sweet as the results may be, the process involves jabbing soft fibers as though they are Julius Caesar and you are a suburban brute.
CAT proudly accepts the designation of “suburban brute,” although she is nothing of the sort. Tabby’s Place’s hometown of Ringoes is rural.
To know CAT is to know that a single heart can contain many suns. CAT bestows warm beams for basking just as easily as solar flares. Her hydrogen and helium giggle at high pitch as you try to keep up, but you can’t keep a straight face long enough to burn. Even if CAT bites you, which is likely, CAT will also bake you and make you grateful to be alive.
If you turn back now, you will dissolve into salt, pungent and sharp. If you stay, you may become soft.
But if you settle in and let your eyes adjust to the light, you’ll get to see CAT’s sweet eclipse her sour. CAT will give you her soft heart, even though she knows the risks.
Under different skies, CAT was poked by promises unkept. It’s one thing to have never known mercy, but quite another to fall from love’s great heights. For reasons we dare not judge, for every human being must fly a private orbit, CAT’s solar system cast her out.
Perhaps she bit too much. Perhaps she purred too little. Perhaps her family’s aches were too great to tell. Certainly we wish them grace and peace.
I personally believe we never get a satisfying answer for a love outage, only the choice of how to proceed when it’s dark and we’re bleeding.
We are all made of wool, warm but flammable.
We all get stabbed.
We can become stiff. We can become salt. We can become soft.
We can even, if we have gentle enough friends, become hearts.
You know the risks, too, don’t you?
You may shine full-strength, only to find that everyone is wearing sunblock.
You may give your all, only to find that the baskets were already full.
You may taste the sweet, only for it to turn to goodbye’s wormwood on your tongue.
That’s the time a sandpaper tongue will tell you the truth: Your safety will be shaken. At times it will feel like sun and moon have gone out. You will be burned and scorned and stabbed.
And then the gentle ones will arrive.
And then you will be held.
And then you will be grateful you let love’s unmaking break you open to grace and peace that none can take.
You will be try not to stab other hearts, and you will fail, and you will be forgiven.
You will be like CAT.
You will be fuzzified.
You will be electrified.
You will be a heart.