April 15: Heartrbreak, Rigoberto Gonzalez, "The Strangers Who Find Me in the Woods"

Heartbreak.  There are times in your life that leave you without words.  I've experienced times like that.  When my wife and I were separated.  When my brother died.  When my sister died.  When best friends moved far away.  Heartbreak is a part of life, like it or not.

I wallow in heartbreak at times.  But I pick myself up eventually.  I have to.  I have too much to do.  Even when I'm wallowing, I can't isolate and ignore.  I have a wife, kids.  Family that depends on me.  Wallowing is a luxury I usually can't afford.

I know somebody right now who is stuck in heartbreak.  She lost someone very close to her, and she blames herself for the death.  She thinks that she could have done something to change an outcome that was inevitable.  It's been almost two years, and heartbreak is still scrubbed on her face like ash from a house fire.

I have no wisdom here.  No advice about how to break a cycle of unending grief.  I barely keep myself afloat some days.  All I can do is offer a listening ear, an understanding shoulder.

Join Saint Marty this Holy Saturday to pray for all the broken hearts of the world.

The Strangers Who Find Me in the Woods

by:  Rigoberto Gonzalez

after Thomas James

The strangers in the woods must mimic squirrels and crackle

with the undergrowth. They must not flinch at the cruelty

of breaking golden leaves with their feet, or of interring stones.

And like any of these deciduous trees in autumn they must be

stingy with shadow and move deceptively across the sludge.

I listen to these strangers stirring with the evenings. I invent paths

for them to the soft edge of the lake. Each descent is as graceful

as a sinking ship, but less tragic somehow because these strangers

don’t possess a lung. I cannot hear them breathe, yet the air

is all whispers, all sighs—the same ethereal muscle that rubs

the color off the foliage. I lost my way out of the woods on the night

every bird went south or numb. A plump rat snatched the moon

and dragged it by the white rope of its tail. The strangers were

a cloak of silhouettes flattening against a trunk like bark.

I must have disappeared among them because the mouth I touched

was not my own and was cruelly closing in on someone’s rib. I carried

such a bite on me, an arc of green and yellow on my side from the man

who said he loved me. In that darkness I knew as much about him

as I did of the amputee swimming his way up the hill with his

only arm. So this is the home of the unturned stone where

the fugitive keeps his kiss! Archeologists will discover a paradise

in the place no touch died of neglect. Is it any wonder all things

forgotten or abandoned find their way here? The winter is back, so too

the bloated body of a book I tossed over the bridge last week.

And there on the bench, is my old smoking habit, a cigarette

glowing on my mouth like a beacon. I’m patient, waiting for the fugitive

to claim me as his own. I’m as wise as any stranger here, alone but with

the knowledge that the grief of separation is always brief.