Everything was necessary.

The absoluteness of your everything distills necessary from … everything.

Everything as necessary is music to my ears, as if notes dancing in and out of their measure, fluid, alighting with grace on the train platform, guiding the curious incongruence between my point A and point B, not bothered by the mess that by now has been wrought by my mixed metaphors.

*****

My heart was first officially broken at nine years old. I had no witness, but God knows how hard I cried over a boy, and the only reason I mention this is not so I could legitimize the pain I felt at nine, which now would seem so juvenile, but so I could ask, then, if time heals anything how come pain feels the same all the time? 

Because that’s my heart right there, on the train platform now, beating for twenty-five years, and I have all the right to protect it, don’t I? No, not from the train commuters shoving up their asses to this modern carriage, because I don’t know any of them from Adam. Neither from the others down there whose commute just parallels mine; lives I’ll never meet. But yes– yes from those I plotted my point-A-to-point-B coordinates with, those I planned to bring with me from here to there, North to South stations and back, those I shoved up my ass to a spot on a crowded train for, and this the source of my collapse, those who would have done these same things for me. And the pain at twenty-five is reminiscent of the pain when I was nine. If time heals all pain how come it hasn’t cured mine?

Silence. Metaphors still mixing. I wouldn’t ride into the commotion if I could help myself, but there are days I take the train so I can help myself. To conjure answers when life has thrown my way nothing, as when I write, patching old wounds with the gauze of my words. Old wounds should have turned into scars by now but I keep picking off the scab. But, hear me, I keep blaming time. I keep feeling the pain so I keep blaming it on time. Sometimes I blame it on my amygdala, too. But there is always an external entity, or an intangible to blame, because it’s easier to deal with pain if you divide the blame by two. And if you write in past tense about those you know and in present tense the strangers. If you keep asking the question for which you can conjure an answer, answers even, for even the clichés could work wonders sometimes. And if you keep hurting for the younger versions of yourself when all you have is one, the now, the one that is all confused in the wtf-ness of the now. But perhaps even your predisposition is necessary. And your too-often broken heart.

*****

And he says everything was necessary.