I hope your heart breaks twice.
The first time when your heart breaks, you learn all there’s to learn about how hearts and economics are different. You don’t need to read tomes about enumerative violence and the politics of empiricism, you learn by living in the after. You don’t skim but stare at a headline that says more than 20,000 killed. There is no metric that can act as a proxy for ‘drowning inside a growing well of unshed tears’. There is no simulation that will let you model the threads of why, why not, what if, what not if, maybe, oh why, oh why oh why. Yes, all models are wrong, but some models are non-existent. There is no rational actor, there is no equilibirium, there is no predictable irrationality, there’s no multiple choice answer to how to break to someone you don’t love them anymore. All you have are poems, most which don’t rhyme, that let you make sense without understanding. Poems are like that; they get away with writing a haiku about drowning.
When the second time your heart breaks, you know that though we live by metaphors, we are the ones who remake them too. You learn that you are an amnesiac. Just as in summer, you forgot that there was a time when you wore socks to bed. You just cannot recall, in that vivid bone rattling detail, that cold, which made you reach for two rajais. It is a memory, and now you know memories fade. You knew firsthand what happened then, in the after, and yet, you are here now, and you have a suspicion, as of now unspoken, even unthought, that it will probably happen again. As you cry, you manage to giggle too. You understand the word compromise differently, as the original meaning intended it to be, a mutually made promise. You now know that the heart is a muscle, it will bleed and tear, and then stitch itself back together, a little tired, a litle sore, and a little bored too. You read poems, and wish they were songs, because you need something that poems cannot reach for, but music perhaps can. You use perhaps a lot. You know that there is no before and an after, there was a maybe then, there is a maybe now.
Middle aged 