In That Place You Will Take Me

There is a place, my little sweetheart, in the well of my chest, that is unlike any other. However the center of thought may be the brain or the governance of bloodflow the heart, this special place is the center of existence. If there is a portal between this world and the next - and I both firmly believe and fervently pray that there is - this is its gateway, its nexus, its physical manifestation. The shock of love sparks there, its tremors felt most keenly. The ache of loss resides most devastatingly there. I didn’t need illustrations to tell me this but I remember seeing one once. A diagram from some tract showing the soul leaving the body, its mystical vapor rising from exactly that place. When you held me in your arms, my little sweetheart, and I would weep with inarticulate joy to have been found by you, you would gently stroke that exact place, that well of being in my chest and quietly call me your treasure. Over and over you would say it to calm me: “my treasure, my treasure, my treasure…” . For months after your tragic passing I kept a knife beside my bed. I imagined constructing a vice with blocks of wood to hold it in place so that I might impale myself on its blade right at that very place where you consoled me and now I ached and wished to drain the life from myself to end the pain and hope my soul to exit its cage and fly to you. One of your dearest childhood friends was still in touch with me in those days - most all have fled, she’s not to be singled out, she’s not alone, that distinction falls to me ... - and knowing not specifically of this but in tune enough to suspect I might take my own life, told me that if I did so I “would never find” you. Those words, that thought stopped me in my tracks. I asked her soon after if her thoughts of this came rooted in religious belief. And they didn’t. She couldn’t really articulate anything of the kind. But even unmoored from faith, the thought took hold with me and strengthened, illuminated my own. I mustn’t take my life, I must let you come to take it for me, and to take me with you. Even as I type these words, I feel that stirring in my chest, in that place where you soothed me. I know when I do fly to you it will be from that departure point. And when I call to you it is from there most deeply too. You visit me through its open door, a door you yourself pried and propped open with the boundless great gift of your love. Please linger there, stay with me a while today, won’t you, my little sweetheart? Please. Please, don’t go too far away…