Soon They Will Eat Your Heart Like Cereals

I woke up with this sentence in my head:

Soon they will eat your heart like cereals.

I don’t know who said it.

I don’t know who they are.

And I don’t know why your heart has apparently become breakfast.

But there it was.

Waiting for me.

There are sentences that arrive carrying explanations.

This wasn’t one of them.

This one arrived carrying a spoon.

Perhaps that’s the way some truths enter us.

Not as revelations.

Not as thunder.

Just a small voice in the kitchen saying:

You should probably know this.

Soon they will eat your heart.

They always do, eventually.

The world takes pieces.

People take pieces.

Love takes pieces.

Memory takes pieces.

You give some away willingly.

Others are taken without asking.

Some pieces are lost simply because you were alive long enough for them to fall out of you.

And yet we keep growing another heart.

Or pretending we do.

We wake up.

Make coffee.

Answer messages.

Go to work.

Fall in love.

Get hurt.

Laugh at something stupid.

Buy groceries.

Come home.

And somewhere between all of these ordinary things, someone is sitting at the table eating us.

Like cereals.

There is something almost insulting about the casualness of it.

Crunch.

Another little piece of you.

Crunch.

Another memory.

Crunch.

Another hope you weren’t quite ready to give away.

Crunch.

Another version of yourself that thought it knew what was going on.

And perhaps this is why we build walls.

Perhaps this is why we become careful.

Perhaps this is why we learn to hold our hearts like precious objects and say:

Nobody gets this.

But a heart that cannot be eaten cannot really be shared.

And a heart that cannot be shared has become something else.

A stone, perhaps.

A relic.

A very well-protected little organ sitting in a museum while life happens outside.

So I think I would rather risk it.

Let them eat.

Let them take their little spoonful.

Let love leave teeth marks.

Let grief have breakfast.

Let strangers carry away pieces of me I never knew they needed.

Let the world be hungry.

I will make another heart.

Not because the old one wasn’t enough.

Because apparently that’s what hearts do.

They break.

They feed things.

They grow back strange.

They keep beating.

And tomorrow morning, someone may sit down at the table again.

They may lift their spoon.

They may look directly at me.

And I may realize that I have been feeding them all along.

That’s alright.

I have eaten hearts too.

We all have.

This is the arrangement.

The strange little breakfast table of being alive.

Soon they will eat your heart like cereals.

So eat theirs back.

Not out of cruelty.

Out of participation.

Out of love.

Out of the ancient understanding that nothing living gets to remain untouched.

And when the bowl is empty, get up.

Wash the spoon.

Go outside.

There is a whole world waiting to take another bite.