The Broken Heart

Sometimes I worried that when I stopped working on the AIDS ward, I’d walk around for the rest of my life with a broken heart, like my heart would actually break, and there’d be no fixing it and I’d look like one of those World War II vets who’d lost his arm and keeps his empty sleeve pinned perfectly to his shoulder.

I did. I wondered if my human heart could actually break.

My friend Ron said his heart had definitely broken, but it had broken open, and for him it was a good thing. He and I were both HIV negative when he said that, but then he tested positive and got sick pretty quickly and moved away. Before he died he sent me a little wooden heart he made himself with a poem by Carl Sandburg on it.

“It’s going to come out all right—do you know?

The sun, the birds, the grass—they know.

They get along—and we’ll get along.”

My co-worker Brian said he didn’t know what to think about broken hearts, but for him it was like we were at a great party where you heard horrific sounds just outside the window but you were supposed to just go on partying.

Our next door neighbor said it was like the scene from The Ten Commandments where Charlton Heston unleashed the ten plagues on Egypt, the last one being a sickly green mist that came up the street and missed our house, but came into his and took his beloved away.

There was a time after an earthquake when the closet door in my bedroom wouldn’t stay shut. I’d lay down and look across the room and there it was, wide open, so deeply dark inside it looked like a grave, and I got up and used a book of matches to wedge it shut.