3.18.17

“Make room in your heart for that which does not belong,” was the worst advice I’d ever received. Before you take advice on the heart, learn the heart, learn to predict it as you do the changing of streetlights or your father’s next words. Once you learn to predict the heart you also learn to avoid it, and once you learn to avoid it you learn to want it as you want everything in this world which you also wish to avoid. But you will learn that the heart is inside of you and things inside of you are impossible to avoid and so they must be dealt with with precision and lethal force, the bloodlusted soul of a war general you’ll assume and your teeth will be wet with anticipation, the thought of the soft heart and its vulnerable flesh, waiting like the fruit that hung and found the mouth of that whore that suffocated our paradise in a single act of greed that still reverberates a few thousand years on and makes us into sufferers. Eat your own heart. Devour its temptations and anxieties, annihilate it totally and allow nothing to enter it, whether it belongs there or not, leave it empty     I’m empty you bastard you’ve emptied me out I hope it was worth it I’m nothing I’m nothing now      and free it from memory or duty of any kind. Then you will have inside you a thing wet with blood and as empty as the center of a ring. Then you will know the heart. Then you will love it as empty and nothing else. Then you will learn that what does not belong there does not belong anywhere and so in fact does not exist, and all you loved or thought you loved was nothing and that you are nothing too   It’s been so long how are you I’m getting married in July     You are nothing but for your heart and the fact that you know it is inside of you.

Written at 1:03 at night, in my office, in Agoura Hills CA, after researching the symptoms of MS and going down a general WebMD wormhole.