Pieces. Parts. Whole

I wrote a piece months, when I was living at my van and volunteering at a seafood cooperative. I wrote it after seeing some art the little girl had made for her mum. It was stuck up above the wood burning stove. The room was quiet, it was just me there. It was dark outside and a few low lights made a warm glow on the old rough stone walls of the kitchen. The art was a piece of white paper with the black outline of a heart on. The heart was full of torn up pieces of colourful paper and underneath was written ‘I love you to pieces’. This is what I wrote when back at my van:

I love you.

I love you to pieces.

To pieces.

I love you so much to lose you would turn me paper thin, tear me apart.

If only human hearts were like lizard tails or crab legs, replaceable, grow back good as new, as if it never happened.

Bonds are broken and over time we still feel pain in that old place, a phantom limb. 

Our grief grows, over time more bonds are snapped and damaged but perhaps these broken bonds don’t diminish our hearts. These severed and frayed cords that connect us to others, our friends, our mother, our brother, they expand us. 

We pay the price of pain but the reward is that we are more than a physical body, a thinking mind; we exist in others as they exist in us.