loose change

I had someone ask me recently, "how do you know who is right?" and I said:

The one that makes your heart beat fast all the time, the one who makes you smile like you don't smile anymore.

Can simple truths like this be real? exist? The same person said that they want to be the great change in someone's life. And I get that. That makes total sense. I just hope for my own sake that that change is possible. That I haven't chipped and prodded and broken enough pieces of my heart off by the time I get to them to have something this is willing to change, willing to feel, willing to hear again. Like a blind man who forgot what colors look like. Or a deaf man who used to hear someone whisper something. Maybe there are more than five senses. And maybe one of them is love. And when that one goes, when it is buried in the ground or put out to sea, then there is no sense in having any other senses.

This same person told me that they were afraid they were going numb, like the callouses on the end of my fingers. I can't get over what a callous feels like, or doesn't feel like. I run my thumb and forefinger over things, the calloused ones, to feel, but its like have a piece of wood in between the object and me. I can feel the friction but not the texture. The heart is a complicated place, and it does not seem to get easier with age. Especially when you try to feel with callouses on your fingers.

There possibly might just be one piece of me left, that last little inch. Where life in its infinitely just way picks apart at you, testing the strong ones, breaking the rest of us. And that last little piece holds on to one branch on the side of a cliff, feet dangling, wind prickling the little hairs on its arms, as it awaits a reason to fall for the last time. And below, bodies lay twisted and mangled, damaged beyond repair it seems, old hopes and dreams and wishes and wants calling it with ghost-like echoes and voices beckoning that last little piece to join them. Every day in every way something to get lost in. Some voice that doesn't sound like mine ringing in my ears to go this way or that, to chase this wind or that cloud, with the same result every time. Scars teach lessons, sometimes. But love can make you stubborn and heartbreak can make you not feel, and somewhere in between the two all that is left is a blind man begging for loose change, or a kiss that makes his heart beat fast.

we all want fighters, but are we willing to fight? how many white flags have been waved? and still how many more are on our horizon waiting to be hoisted in surrender?

Somewhere there must be a wishing well where wishes actually do come true. Maybe I can take one of those pennies someone left me and I can wish for my life to be like a series of pictures drawn at the top of the page. And when you flip it backwards those broken parts magically fly back up to the top of the hill, and that last little dangling piece of me goes with them and they join hands and lock arms and I can become one again.

That's the change.