love stars kept in native american pots?

A friend of mine was talking to me about stars tonight. The word in Spanish for stars is estra, which literally means broken pieces (or something like that...I only know the French). Anyway, he said something really poignant, and I'm going to paraphrase and fuck this up from a lot of different angles I'm sure, but what he said really struck me and I'm trying to make sense out of it.

He said, "When you fall in love with someone, your heart breaks into a million tiny pieces but it's ok because the person you love is there holding all the broken pieces in their hand. The problem is when they leave, all the pieces fall away and you wind up having to run around collecting them and gluing them back together, but you can never find all of them ever again so you replace the lost ones with other stuff."

My initial response was what a beautiful way to describe love. And my second initial response (basically they came at the same time) was I wish that I still had all the pieces of my heart. Like all the pieces exactly as they were when I was born. I don't know what that says about me. Probably that I'm pessimistic or something, but I really do wish that. But maybe I only wish that because the new stuff that has been added to all the broken pieces in the process of me trying to adhere them all together again, has influenced me to miss the old pieces?? Like, maybe I wouldn't know to miss the old pieces if they weren't gone...oh the irony?!

It reminds me of an art project I did in the third grade. I made a 'Native American' pot. It was so friggin' cool, man. It took me weeks to make that damn thing and I was so effing proud of it. I wrapped it in a gazillion paper towels, put it in my lunch pail and took it on the daycare bus with me one Friday afternoon. When I got to daycare, I showed it to my daycare teacher Miss Stacy. She was so impressed with my skills-of-an-artist that she took a picture of me holding it. She even called my mom, who was at work, to tell her how excited I was about it. When my mom got there to pick me up that afternoon, I ran to hug her and as she walked towards my lunch pail (she was about twenty feet from it) I ran towards it, ripped open the pail and abruptly dropped the pot onto the floor. It broke into a million pieces and I began to sob. My mom cried and so did Miss Stacy. We never found one of the pieces from the pot, but my mom hot glued the rest of it back together that night when we got home. It's bumpy in spots now and not all of it fits together and there's a hole in one side from the missing piece, but I love it because every time I come home and look at it, I remember that I need to take my time so that I don't lose something important to me. Every time my mom dusts it, she cries. And every time I see her crying when she dusts it, we cry together and talk about that afternoon. I think we're crying about different perspectives of the incident, but we cry none the less.

Maybe that's what I need to do with my heart, take time with the matters that concern it so that I don't lose important stuff on the way. I don't want to cry every time I fall in love and it doesn't work out, I just want to know that I did my best and be happy with that, but for some reason I enjoy being disillusioned by love and then I enjoy letting it slap me in the face and force me onto my fat ass. Maybe you're right, Joely. Maybe it's the nature of me to suffer, but it hurts a lot too. Again, with the irony...dammit.