I have a hole in my heart

I have a hole in my heart. It needs patching up. Every morning, I get up and see myself in the mirror. The person who looks backs at me from the other side has an air of confidence. Well pressed clothes, nicely combed hair, collar buttoned up to hide the line where the coat of the moisturizer ends on the neck, with a smile calculated to charm. But I look deeper into the mirror and I see that his heart is punctured. I have tried to clean, dress and close the oozing wound and make it impervious to any further attacks hurled at it but the sutures do not hold for long, neither does the smile.

I step out of my house and I see flickering lights everywhere. I chase the lights and plunge at the illusory happiness, the desperation of my plunges tempered only with the civility of my upbringing. But those lights recede further and further and I end up staring at a dead end. Sometimes, I try to group the lights together and give them a collective shape, a shape which conveys a meaning and a purpose. But the lights rebel. They are neon lights after all. They modulate their brilliance and their hues according to the vagaries of their mood. They are only to entice, not to lead or to enlighten the path.

When I retire at night in the bed, I hear the sound of something dripping, trickling down. Alarmed, I switch on the lights and check every faucet in the house. Everything seems fine. All the taps are tightly wound up, with the exact amount of torque, like the way they should be. Relieved, I retire to my bed once more. But the sound keeps coming, the periodic trickle of an overflow which is being restrained against its wishes. Almost like a machine and with a skill which tooks years of practice, I numb myself to the sound, relegating it to the background, a solitary jarring note in an otherwise perfect medley. And I sleep. I sleep my night away.

I have a hole in my heart. It needs patching up.