"Take your broken heart ~ Turn it into ART." - Carrie Fisher

Key West, Florida is a place of transients, lost souls, guiltless daytime drinkers, corporate burnouts, retirees, northerners downright fed up with long, muscle-tense winters, and broken hearts trying to mend. After a 4:45am drive, three planes, a four-hour bus ride on the one long water-bordered road from Miami (the winds on the key being too wild to land the plane there), and one final cab, I arrived here for the first time with my mom on a rather extravagant birthday excursion and found myself at the hotel bar drinking piña coladas with Susan the bartender who moved here twenty-two years ago after her husband left her for her best friend, taking two of their four cats. And Randy, thin, leathery, flamboyant, and charmingly garish in his love for this place, who owns a members-only restaurant bar and has two black labs he adores, bought me a shot of tequila and took my business card. He has some connections to music venues here, and even though I arrived in a total state of stormy disarray and haven’t been able to make eye contact and greet people on the street the way I often can, I am once again reminded that you get what you give; you cannot make connections if you don’t open your eyes and look into the eyes of others. Ask questions. Be open. Own your heartache. And the empathetic nods and parallel stories are coaxed gently from strangers, who quickly become less strange.

There is a difference between privacy and secrecy. Because I write and sing, I stay pretty wide open. I’ve made it my job to observe, reflect, create, and share, forever seeking deeper connection with whoever is on the other end, hoping to shrink the divide between us, because I really believe (pardon me: my hippie roots are showing) that we are put on this earth to love and take care of each other—to reach out and connect. That’s always been it for me. People. Love. Forming the bonds and tending to them. The past year (ten or so months, to be more exact) has taken that formula to task. I have been quiet. I’ve been private. I have kept secrets. And for someone like me, that can be very harmful. So in the interest of saving the bond I have with myself, which may be the most important one each of us has, I’m going to write my way through my pain and share what I can, in hopes that a healthy dose of harsh truth will simultaneously dip into someone else’s pool of secrecy and make her or him feel a little less guarded, a little more open, and maybe even less alone. While we all maintain the right to hold our truths silently to our chests, sometimes the sweetest gift we can give ourselves is to simply open the cage and watch our own wild, aching birds burst forth into the sky in a flurry of old feathers that no longer serve the wings.

Here goes nothin’. In the spring I fell in love. She is a classically trained viola player from the south, currently an investigator by trade, and she is dynamic and powerful and fun and surprising and bold and frightening, often exceedingly kind and generous, and just as often hot-tempered and rash with a tone of voice that can go from sweet syrup to bitter citrus in an instant—and the sting of that sour note is remarkable, and unforgettable…it’s effective, and it’s excruciating. She has smooth brown skin, she smokes cigarettes, and sometimes she stays up all night partying and sleeps the whole next day. She works hard and shows up to marches for justice; she is trained in it, knows the chants and battlecries, shouts for the crowd to “Stay tight!” when they wander too far outward, and delivers water to weary protestors. She says “Fuck the po-lice,” and she means it. I've wished I was beside her every step of those marches. She is a Bernie supporter, who like many of us, voted for HRC because that’s what the DNC gave us, but she wasn’t proud of it. She considers herself a kind of witch and “manifests” things, willing what she wants into action. She loves lavender and rose gold and pistachio ice cream and elephants. She is passionate and angry and unafraid. These details are only important because I know them. In your story, they are different details, but you know them, so thoroughly, so intimately, and with such deep reverence. Loving her has been one of the most exhilarating and painful things I’ve ever done. I didn’t have a choice…and I didn’t stand a chance.

Falling in love is one of life’s most daring, insane, involuntary, and beautiful events. It’s miraculous. It’s all-encompassing. It’s gigantic and strange. And it’s new every time. But when you are married and falling in love with someone who is not your husband, that love turns strained and desperate. It’s considered shameful. It’s a secret. And it cannot breathe. It is conversations on the phone in dark parked cars. It’s selfies in bathroom stalls. It’s letters. It is broken plans and tears and frustration and longing and apologies. It means that you are deeply disappointing people and yourself, it is often characterized by monstrous guilt, and it becomes a relentless brand of self torture, minute after minute. It’s the rollercoaster ride that doesn’t end because you are strapped in tight and because the track is growing out of itself in real time, the loops and twists built the instant before you reach them, and there is no foresight or prediction, just gut-wrenching swoops, the momentary steady climb, and then the devastating falls. It is revolving ache and relief, euphoria and pain, and it often feels like hugely failing. 

What I haven’t said yet, but what I suppose is implicit, is that I’ve been faced with a crisis of identity. I’m married to a wonderful man who is my best friend, my co-writer, my bandmate, my family, my partner in everything…but he is a man. And where I always figured I fell somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, I didn’t know, because I never tested the waters before I met my life partner—and once you fall in love with the person who will become that life partner, you kind of just assume that the wondering piece is over, and you forge ahead with joy and hope and plans and the best intentions. In our case, we threw a music festival on the property of our converted barn; our neighbors hosted the ceremony officiated by my uncle, and they made the carrot cake and provided the champagne for the toast; my dad wrote a wedding song, and we sang to each other’s faces; I wrote a poem that my cousin read, and in front of everyone we love, we recited the lines of commitment, and we meant them. Blissful and secure and full of a shared appetite for adventure and the desire to experience everything together, she appeared, and we thought, we can do anything. 

I never knew the fissures were there. She found them. She seeped through, pulled at the walls of our good house with her talons, ripped them into gaping holes, tore the whole foundation apart, stomped on the splinters. And I was a part of all of that destruction; I felt it, watched it, helped, covered my eyes, threw my fists into the walls, bandaged them up... Once we were left sitting in the wreckage, unable to see each other through a thick cloud of ruin, she lifted her gaze, saw a bird of almost mythical beauty approaching at top speed, and she reached out, caught hold, and just like that, she was gone. She is gone. Soaring, elated, far away, high above, in some other atmosphere, and she couldn’t care less about me. Or us. Or the damage. She’ll never own it. She feels justified, vindicated, and she let go of me like I was a stack of plates on fire. She saw the route away, and the cycle begins again: she is in love. 

And the shitty truth is that I’m not a good enough person to be happy for her. Not yet. Maybe never. I told myself I would be, when and if this happened—that the best parts of me would surface, and I would turn the wheel, hand over hand, accelerating as I hit that high road; I said I’d choose tenderness and that because so much has passed between us, over a thousand songs and all that hanging on, that the care is what could persist. But she dismantled me. Violently. I am not vilifying someone I have loved this way—it’s just the truth. And now that she’s gone, all I can do is ache and ache. All night last night, not a single minute of sleep, I held my hand to my heart in the hotel bed with crisp white sheets, covering my body (foreign, inferior, not enough) with the extra pillows, breathing, each inhale a labor, not one exhale letting any of the hurt escape…but I’m told (and maybe I know) that over time, that begins—that the breaths get smoother, and the heart stops quaking, and you look up and out and into people’s eyes again and find those moments of connection…and maybe you laugh and laugh and laugh. Grief is unsustainable, thankfully. And I’ve never tended toward it when I can help it.

So what is left of me? Of us? Are the pieces salvageable? Is it maybe the greatest love story of all time? Does the retirement plan on that Tuscan hillside still exist, Suave stirring the sauce as I pluck grapes from the vine and drop them into a bucket for the wine-making? Am I worth forgiving? Can I be with a man, even if he is the best person this twisted, knotty, booby-trap riddled life has shown me? Can I come back? Is there a return path? Can anybody tell me anything? Suave, are you still there, and do you want me, and can we find each other’s hands again? Where is this place? Have I lost altogether?   

I’ve outed myself because silence, for me, for a songbird, for a person built of words and music, is impossible, feels like choking, feels like drowning, and I have kept my mouth shut for too long. And ya know what else?—I need you. I need people. I need your connection, even if you’re angry as hell at me, and you think I’m selfish and horrible. Just say a thing to me. Say anything. I am exhausted by my own silence. I can’t keep it anymore, and I’m desperate for the sound of your call. When I was a kid walking to meet my cousins halfway between our houses in the woods, we called out “Keee-wahhhh-keeee!” to gauge the distance between us. Did we start running when we caught sight of each other? I can’t remember. But I’m calling out to you: Keee-wahhh-keeeee! It’s nonsense, but if you call back out into this cavernous space between us, this colossal, silent space I have wedged between myself and everyone else, I promise I’ll start running as fast as I can.

The only thing that makes these revolutions of new mornings worth their salt is the promise of that connection to other humans—the whole choking, thriving, dying, screaming, terrorizing, warring, fucking, losing, playing, singing, feasting, agonizing, loving lot of us. One day I will likely say I’m glad this all happened because it knocked me down so low that I was forced to use every muscle I have to climb out. I am worse for the wear now, and I will be different then. Tougher too. Love is still the best thing. I believe it, even here, in the January of my heart, disparately sitting on a poolside patio under the brilliant sun by a plantain tree, pop reggae blasting from the tiki bar, the smell of Cuban cigars wafting from the hot tub. I am falling apart in a beautiful place. It’s so strange to be one of the heartbroken here in paradise; I guess many of them must figure it’s easier to heal here than anywhere else, and then they just stay, because when you finally come around to your own happiness again, how totally glorious to be in perfect harmony with the world around you. One day soon, I will look up and there will be a vast murmuration of starlings shifting as one across the sky, and I’ll put my hand to my heart again, find a steadier beat there, knowing that when connected to each other, we are our very best. We can fly. We can do anything. With you, I can do anything.

~

*Suave is strong and steadfast and remains my biggest support. He’s read this piece, and he asks you to please not call him.