Reflections of an Unquiet Heart

By

Thomas B. Wallace

     He stared down at the three long sheets of paper in his hand as if they existed in a dimension just the other side of his understanding and wondered where the last twenty-one years had gone and what lasting value they had produced. He had thought of them as pretty good years, filled with the ups and downs of bearing and raising a family. Of lifting every one up when they fell, brushing off the dust and cleaning the bruises that life leaves in its relentless wake, and then laughing about it later. Somehow, the thin white sheets he held now belied that image with a quiet sense of diminished hope. What he had thought a, if not ecstatic, at least a quietly satisfying marriage simply was no longer, either satisfying, ecstatic or anything else…

     "In the matter of…" had reduced him now to half of a matter, a moment, an object in time without permanence and only half its own definition. The sad part was that, as hurt and as silently devastated as he was, he felt no great compulsion to struggle against the adversarial nature of the "…matter…". He knew, vaguely, in the darkness of his heart - that restless and beguiling organ over which he had only been master through ruthless and relentless suppression - he was at fault.

     The same ruthless repression that had mastered that unquiet organ and stilled its self-destructive demands had made him distant, seemingly unaffected by any impulse to spontaneity or passion. He had never really been mean, just cool, never really angry, just removed, affectionate, not intimate, involved, not committed.

     Now, of course, all the years of disciplined emotional distance left him feeling just empty. There was pain, a lot of it, but just as with all pain, if he retreated to the center core of it and let it surround him in an envelope of its own density, he could reside there unaffected, feeling the pain but not letting it mold him. He wondered, within that cocoon, if he was not just carrying on with the same set of responses that had brought him here in the first place?

     Suddenly, unexpectedly, he was overcome with intense grief. It flew up like a spear from the very center of his chest and thrust out into the silence of the bedroom. A huge, wracking sob that released all of the pent up anger, fear, regret, guilt and loss those years of living life could inflict on a person. It erupted into the silence like a bomb blast. The papers he held crumbled into a wretched tube of lost hope and unrealized dreams as he fell over onto his side on the bed and curled into a tight ball and sobbed uncontrollably, grieving all of the loss that a lifetime now held for him.

     He did not know how long he lay there like that. Minutes, perhaps hours. It didn’t really matter, because, when the grief passed there lay on the other side of it a terrifying compulsion to be punished for this failure. He was as lonely now as he had ever been. She was the only "friend" he had allowed himself this last twenty-one years and now that friendship was torn apart by the devastation of a marriage that simply would not work for her any longer. He wanted to be able to fill that void, to reach into her unquiet heart and tell her that he loved her and wanted her, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t not because he didn’t but because now he couldn’t believe that she would want him again, or could want him again. The darkness within was too thick, too overlaid with dismal and frightening images to share, and so he had always locked them securely inside, working out their demands in an emotionally removed solitude. He couldn’t do that any longer with her. She demanded more and he couldn’t give it to her and he knew it.

     He couldn’t give it to her, because, in his unquiet heart, he knew she wouldn’t, couldn’t accept it. So, with that same restless organ pounding at the walls of his chest, thrusting at the sobs that barely held below his throat, he turned away from that decision, just as he always did. After all, wasn’t that why he was this way, all that pain that drives him right to the edge of his own destruction? What good would he, could he be to her, destroyed? She had a right to want what she wanted, and he loved her enough to know he couldn’t give it, not freely, not limitlessly.

     He rolled off the bed, carried the crumpled tube of papers to the desk and carefully ironed them out with his hands. There he took a pen and signed away twenty-one years to his unquiet heart…

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