stoned.

I was told last night that I had a hard heart. It was a joke. Funny funny ha ha. But it's sometimes difficult for Meredith to leave intended jokes as jokes when their subject matter is not joke-like at all. 

I thought about it last night, upon returning home to climb into the twin bed that occupies the apartment which I occupy alone, and wondered whether or not it was the reason why I have been occupying things alone all of my life. No, it can't be, I thought. It's a product of all of that. Not the cause of it. 

I thought about it this morning, and I was back in that purple chair in that cookie-cutter room on that seventh grade Sunday School morning. Our learning topic was the reality of God hardening hearts. Their hearts are filled with confusion and doubt and he gets sick of dealing with their disbelief or rejection or disobedience, and so he takes their wayward wishy-washy heart and takes away its capacity to know him. I was relieved that day, assured because of my blatant belief, that I would not ever have to be one of those people. Not today. Yikes. 

I thought of it a few hours later, in the coffee shop, when responding to a friends email. Apologies were made because of vulnerability. I wondered if people apologize for vulnerability because they are aware of this hardened heart that I didn't know was currently occupying my chest cavity. 

I thought if it in "Up", the poignant Pixar movie that shows us, in a matter of moments, that people we love will eventually die. I was waiting for the part where I was supposed to "cry" because I had been told it's "sad". I didn't cry, but instead reached for that part in the center of my body right above my breasts to see if I could feel a rock forming. 

There's no rock. I count my heart beats per minute regularly, so I know it's still working. I cried the other evening in my apartment. I guess I am just wondering what a hardened really looks like.