The way we describe love-pain – it’s all wrong. An injured heart doesn’t shatter, like volcanic obsidian. It grows, like lava. Under pressure, it becomes heavy and dense and hot.

The weight of an injured heart anchors us to the earth. The mass confers upon us visibility to others. The heat draws creatures to our side. Love-pain connects us, even as we feel we must hide. Love-pain is lava; it changes the landscape as it burns. An injured heart is not weak and brittle. It is the rawest Earth; it is furious creation.

A human heart becomes obsidian only upon death, when the body cools and stills. All we leave behind, in the tumbling soil, is the black mirror, through which those that follow us divine their future love.

It would make more sense to fall once
To love until it surrenders to the hurt
Found in folded laundry socks
And empty grocery carts.
When I met the soul a second time
I tried to run so far and fast
That I stumbled into a war
Of paper plated pizza and sweatpants.
Maybe there is a second way to turn back
To get tangled in the way it feels
But remain attached to your puppet string.
I fell for you because it made sense
To a believer of this one time chance.
But now the soul is settled on a goodbye kiss
And I am afraid of losing my own grip.
But I let it go.
And feed love to the cats.

We recognize each other, the lost ones. In Mexico the orange flowers – flor de muertos - glow as soft lamps in the gloom, calling the lost dead home. We see the same glow – it’s a fire, but cold and slow - in the living lost. And so we know.

I see the space station passing over, and I wave, and think about all the silent machines above me. Orbit is a controlled fall – I remember that. An endless downwards hurtle, but with just enough forward momentum to keep from hitting the ground. Freefall. I think about satellites, and how this barely controlled freefall is the only way that they can fulfill their purpose. I think some people are like satellites: we also live out our lives in freefall.

Satellite people, that’s us. We’re the ones who always say the wrong thing to the wrong person, or the right person at the wrong time. We didn’t get the Rulebook for Human Interaction that the others got given at birth, or soon after. Or if we did, we never read it – discipline was never our strong point.

People in freefall Get It Wrong, often. We’re good at self-justification, and we tell ourselves that she doesn’t really love him, that our unhappy childhoods are to blame, that our badness makes us interesting. We never got the hang of sensible, grown-up love - our bodies shake, our souls twist and burn inside our limbs, and we open our big mouths, and the only thing we can keep down is Jim Beam and dry toast, because we don’t know if it’s all going to be OK, now we’ve spoken.  In all probability, we’re never going to know.

We live our whole lives in freefall, people like us, but with just enough forward momentum to keep us alive. And we are alive – ****** and embarrassed and scared, but alive. It’s when we feel nothing, that’s when people like us hit the ground.