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The other day in the middle of an unrelated conversation Rick disclosed information about a past relationship.  It wasn’t big or alarming information nor was it relating to anyone he had a long term relationship with.  I think prior to me his longest relationship was perhaps about 4 months or so.  I can’t say for sure because he has a sketchy memory at best about these things and most often he shuts me down when I start to obsessively ask questions about things that just don’t matter anymore.  I share information with him regarding my past relationships but he never asks for it.  Never.  I think that’s the difference between men and women.

Upon this disclosure of information I realized that my major malfunction was that I was jealous.  Jealous of the past?  That’s just craziness.  Especially when my past is so crazy insane compared to his.  And yet I was.  And instead of acting insane and irrational…I just went to him…hugged him and said “this is crazy but I feel that tinge of jealously because my mind does not like to picture you with anyone else.”  He hugged me and it was over.

That fleeting bad feeling. 

I recently read The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst.  There’s a passage in the book that speaks about our second heart.

“It’s true, isn’t it, that each of us has two hearts?  The secret heart, curled behind like a fist, living gnarled and shrunken beneath the plain, open one we use every day.  I remember a night about a year or so ago, when I was lying next to Lexy, unable to sleep.  For some reason, I began thinking about a woman I had known in college, a woman I had dated for only six or seven weeks.  It was not a serious relationship, at least it wasn’t to her, but I had fallen in love with her, and it shamed me to realize that, all these years later, I still felt pain that she had not loved me back.  How can it be, I wondered, that we can be lying in bed next to a person we love wholly and helplessly, a person we love more than our own breath, and still ache to think of the one who caused us pain all those years ago?”  It’s the betrayal of this second heart of ours, its flesh tied off like a fingertip twined tightly round with a single hair, blue-tinged from lack of blood.  The shameful squeeze of it.  Lying there that night, with Lexy beside me, I was surprised to find myself where I was.  I was surprised to find that I had lived a whole life in the meantime.  And sitting here now, with all of Lexy’s dreams in my lap, I realize there are things about her I will never know.  It’s not the content of our dreams that gives our second heart its dark color; it’s the thoughts that go through our heads in those wakeful moments when sleep won’t come.  And those are the things we never tell anyone at all.”  - Carolyn Parkhurts (p. 228) 

I share all of this because I think my second heart is always fearful of losing him…because that second heart has been hurt before.  But my current heart is learning to trust the here and now and forget about all that has come before now….because it is today that is to be treasured the most.

I highly recommend The Dogs of Babel…it was a very good read.