Splitting Time
I used to marvel at people who said they split their time between here and there. It seemed so adventurous - having your cake and eating it too. I wanted to be one of these modern day travelers, so I set out to try and be just that.
Now, my time is split every which way to Sunday. Van dwelling tends to do that. But what the splitters don’t tell you, what they never shared with me, is that coming and going has its own unique set of challenges. Like saying goodbye, like cleaving off a piece of your heart and burying it in the dirt to be dug up and reattached upon return.
Only problem is, a different piece was left somewhere else miles back up the road, so you can never really achieve that whole-heart feeling again. Pieces of you will always ache, will always yearn for a lazy, cobble-stone street, for a bustling open-air market, for empty red canyons carved by thousands of years of mother nature’s persistence.
Who started this myth of needing a whole, unbroken, intact heart anyways? Do we really need a complete, unmarred unit to be happy, to be curious, to be loved and to give love? I actually am beginning to think a broken heart may be better than an unbroken one.
Rumi said the heart breaks over and over so that light can get in, or out, maybe. I can’t totally remember. But this splitting time between here and there incurs a lot of unintentional breaking of my own heart. Like a kid banging a piggy bank against the driveway, knowing full well it’s going to shatter but wanting the benefit of what’s inside regardless.
Maybe we should take our own hearts and break them open ourselves, pulling pieces off by the fistfull and handing them out, like juicy, sweet orange slices to the people and the places we bump up against along the way.
Or maybe we trade pieces of our own hearts with others, like baseball cards or state park stickers or well-loved books. That way, when we run our fingers over our memories, we can see little bits of all the people, of all the places, we’ve ever loved and know that they feel bits of us too.
If we do it this way, we don’t just have one half of a broken heart, an incomplete vessel beating in our chests, longing to get back to some place or some time or some one. Instead, each place, each time, each person is with us always, as patches on our own hearts, filling in the empty space we left back in the last town, or in the hands of a love from a lifetime ago.
