Strings of my Heart

Change

Friday, October 17, 2025

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Some vestige of me lies dormant, but I don't think I'll be able to coerce it out anymore as though it were an old dog, and I could merely dangle a piece of meat in front of it. Where this part of me was once active and compelling, I find it quiet and submissive.

It's like I'm leaving something behind, but I wasn't the one who decided to leave it. I've noticed the effects of whatever thing's departure from me before, but I cannot decide whether it was more like a parasite, or more like a quality.

It's like a slow drum of rain might wash me away.

For example, beauty seems to have little sway over me, and its allure is no longer a roaring tide. I can acknowledge my attraction toward a few others, what little of it there is, but it's nothing more than a breath in the wind. Where beauty once stunned me—enraptured me—it's just a brief flash of light in a long chasm of darkness, a small stroke of color on a black and white canvas.

It's almost as if I'd prefer to hold onto this feeling that swayed me so, though I know it's of little use, and neither white knuckles nor persistent wishes will draw it back to me. This much, I know to be true.

Something beneath the strings of my heart craves to expel the way I feel, but I imagine it would mean very little me, and even less to those who would hear it. Even after the strongest of men stoop, and the brightest of stars grows dark, I doubt I'll be able to find someone whose sentiments for me outweighs their disinterest.

Though there are many days when I wish I could shout and cry, rage and lust, and lament so the very heavens might hear me, a piece of me has been replaced by a soundless intention that urges me to find the company of those who would make me feel more like myself.

So there is no doubt; a part of me is missing. Despite I used to toil at its disappearance like I was some kind of emotional tyrant, I find shy reluctance in brushing it aside. I am but one man! That is not lost on me! And my heart is and always has been but a doormat for others to scrape their heels—except for only a stark few.

I suppose I can now see a reason as to why many people rely on their romantic counterparts for a sense of passion and vigor. But it's in this moment I get the subtle inclination that perhaps romanticism, beauty, allure, and attraction were never meant for someone like me.

So I think I had forgotten the silence of being alone. I could never forget the invisibility of it, but the silence is something else entirely, and I suspect God would like to remind me.

Not even sex nor lust desire nor passion pull at the strings of my heart;

If only my heart weren't quite so fragile,

I wouldn't feel so split apart.

Sometimes I wish I could remember the sweetest of allures,

Of women and bodies and skin and nerves;

But it seems as though all has drifted into the dimly lit obscure.

If I could but reach out and once again seize -

that which used to impassion me,

Perhaps I could bide my time.

But something's been taken from me—something now resting in the dark;

In return for me through tenfold grief and lingering scars,

It's left only a thin glass line.

So now I lie and wait for something besides exalting -

Sensations and chills and all the fleeting pleasures.

I only wish to feel at home.

Whether I find it through a person a place or a thing,

Then perhaps life wouldn't be so monochrome.