Break your heart

So I guess I've complained enough about my new management role at work for this season, it's a lot like new dress shoes, they usually hurt your feet, but in the long run you come out looking better for having worn them. I'm being stretched to all limits now. Some parts are fun, some parts suck, and some parts are so human that when the day ends and I am alone with myself I just want to cry. One of my new employees came to me the other day needing time off, she said the doctors found a lump in her breast and she had to have a routine check up. She broke down and fell against me crying Sunday when she found out that the cancer she had beat twice is back, and is now spread to both breasts and possibly her lungs. Against a bright blue Texas sky the birds sang as she wept.
I helped a young couple today, the man wanted to plant flowers at his new home for his wife, he said, you see, I only have a few days left before I'm deployed, who knows when I'll be back.
A lonely little woman had me help her choose the perfect flowers to brighten up her bed, her husband passed a year to the day, and he always did the yard work, and now she is lost without him.
I pass my days chatting with all sorts of people, but they all have a story, and they all seem to just want to get it out. Another little lady, I would have to guess she was in her late seventies, spent the longest time picking flowers with me. Before we had finished she smiled at me and said "this day reminds me of a song", she sang it to me, and I wish I could remember the words, but it was beautiful, and the breeze took it away as fast as it fell from her lips. I thanked her for helping me find a song in the day.
Perhaps it's just me. Maybe it's the full moon, maybe it's a world full of us all struggling to not get lost, broken by disease, broken by the grief of losing the man you spent fifty years with, broken by the reality of foreign soil and the fear of never coming home, broken by a life that passes so quickly.
I took a different path at the park tonight when I walked the dog. I went up a side hill, and the moon was so big on the horizon, there in the opening were several doe, beautiful, graceful, the sunsetting, the moon rising, silence in a million plus city, the dog sat there and the deer just looked back at me for the longest time, and thoughts ran and swirled and drifted. You have a story, I probably know part of it, I have a story, we all love and break and cry and laugh and sing, and somedays it';s so fucking real that we can hardly stand it,and somedays it's so big that it crushes us, so we find a quiet connection, we make eye contact for a brief moment, and we find the solace in a stranger and sometimes it breaks our hearts....


"I know it will hurt.I know that it will break your heart.The way things are and the way they've been.Don't spread discontent, don't spread the lies.Don't make the same mistakes with your own life.You know it will always come back"
~~Natalie Merchant,
"Break your heart"