Open Heart Surgery

We had claimed to be woven from the same cloth! We had wrapped our love in poetry, and swore that nothing could harm our childlike joy that we received from loving and laughing together.

Now she was removing my heart again, with a terrible antiseptic thrust, as we sat on the middle of a Grand Rapids street. We had stopped here for a jag to revaluate our fate at a small mission hospital fortress that catered to the homeless in the middle of Bum Town, which is what downtown Grand Rapids was at this time of day. The hospital had some huge steps that one could sit down to survey the kingdom of dirty concrete jungle and grey glumness of parked cars and dying ideals that could freeze anyone's blood. Heidi's eyes looked dark and veiled. This was not a place where love could survive. Heidi brought this point home to me like a bludgeon to the head, by being brutally honest about our affair, and telling me that it was completely done for. It was wrong, and we both knew it. Right at that moment a bum walked by who looked so disheveled that he appeared to have walked off a movie set! He was hunchbacked permanently with his nose to the ground, and he clothes were literal rags hanging off of him. He looked up and grimaced like a turtle peering out from his shell and despising light. I at once latched onto the poor beggar and felt like his soul was my soul at that instant, completely shattered from head to toe by the realization that Heidi was done. We tried to revive the flawed relationship a few times after this moment, but nothing could repair it from this obvious moment of perfect despair.

4/17/23

Bunny Villaire