Bleeding Hearts

Walking amid primrose, bleeding hearts and tulips, I feel colorless. All of us walk around as if we were ordinary when inside, ideas are churning and blood is pumping, nourishing our organs. I'm amazed when someone tells me something about myself that I didn't know---mostly because it often isn't true. All of us have internal and external selves and we humans make assumptions. I asked my class in Critical and Creative Thinking how many of them had experienced a misunderstanding through email or text message and just about every student raised his or her hand. We are clumsy at communication. Reading between the lines, we see a callousness or intimacy that may not exist. Even as a writer, I often blunder on the page. But I would take imperfect writing any day of the week. Notes, letters, postcards, and even emails are important to me. I learned as a young child to revere the written word. In a sense it gave me a kind of power I never felt I had when speaking. I still prefer writing to talking on the phone. I've learned to speak or read my work in public but I'm never completely comfortable. I just fake it better now. Like the amazing bleeding heart, a person's exterior can look very different from her interior or emotional state. I marvel at the complicated shape and color of this flower, realizing that we are also complex and our season of perfect blooming is short, not always fully realized.