Boulders of the Heart

Ever walked around with something that you could never put down?  A weight which, no matter how hard you worked, never got any lighter?

Sometimes, it feels like you’re trying to live your life with a boulder in your heart.

They can take a lot of different forms: Maybe it’s guilt over a thing you’ve done, or guilt over a thing you wish you’d done.  Maybe you can’t let go of a person who got away, or the slow grind of the one you wish would just go away.

Maybe you worry about money, or school, or money to pay for school, or borrowing money you didn’t have to pay for school.

Maybe it’s all of those, maybe you just really worry about that one time you burped in 1998 and everyone around you gave you a look and you just can’t forget it so that one thought eats you alive until one day you realize you’ve had your eighth cup of coffee and it’s only 7 AM.

Maybe that last one is just me.

Regardless, this boulder is impossible to get rid of.  It’s a freaking boulder.  I mean, what would you do if there was suddenly a boulder right outside your house.  Just one Wednesday you wake up and BOOM, 6000+ pounds of rock right where it doesn’t belong.   And you realize you never could get the hang of Wednesdays, also you realize that there’s a boulder, and also that you’re on your eighth cup of coffee and it’s only 8 AM.

You know, right away, that it’s going to take an extraordinary amount of money and effort to get rid of that boulder.  And it’s simply devastated your garden.  Those turnips have bought it, pure and simple.

So you live your life around the stupid thing, knowing it’s a problem, knowing it’s causing issues, but also knowing you lack both the funds and the know-how to make it get off your carrots.  You start wearing a path in the dirt around the stupid thing, because you’re just trying to get to your shed and is that a crime Martha and NO I don’t feel bad about this cup of coffee why are you asking?!

And then you wake up one morning, and realize just how much the rock has distorted your life.  Your house is rotting because of the water it lets in.  Your garden is simply gone, never to recover.  The path you’ve worn in the dirt?  You paved that ages ago, thinking that was the best solution to the muddy shoes you got walking back to the shed.

You want to do something about it, but now you feel like it’s a part of things.  You feel that dealing with it will upend whatever fragile sense of normality you’ve managed to build up around it.  You’re scared:  The boulder is what you know now, and change means more work.  And you put in so much effort on redoing the basement after that last flood, and you spent so much time and money making the path decorative as well as functional.

Finally, it’s too much for you to take.  The daily comments about the boulder from everyone and anyone who sees it.  The shame, when you can be bothered to actually see the boulder for the misplaced heap of earth that it is, having no business anywhere near your home, let alone being given a place there as though it belonged.

So you deal with it.  You sign the forms, you hire the companies, you have it removed.

Then you wake up, and it’s gone.  As seamlessly vanished from your life as it had arrived.  The damage remains however.  The barren patch of beaten earth that had once given you vegetables to munch on.  The smashed path, misshapen and bulged where you’d built around the stupid thing.  And your house has a visible tilt to it that you’ll have to pay even more to get mud-jacked back up to center.

Things are better now.  The boulder is gone now.

The work remains, however.  So roll up your sleeves, do all the crying you need to, and start healing.  You owe it to yourself.  Just as I owe it to myself.

I loved that garden.  It’s about time I had it back.

Love,

The Unsheathed Quill